


In the Heart of Stars

by Kibbers



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abandoned Town, Ballet, Fallen Stars, Found Family, Isolation, Lost Love, M/M, Major Character Injury, Slow Burn, Swimming, Violence, small town, wandering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-06 19:11:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 67,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10342734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kibbers/pseuds/Kibbers
Summary: Sam Winchester spent centuries as a star, dancing through the darkness alongside fellow star, Gabriel. But, then he falls and the sky seems so very far away, Gabriel too. With dwindling hope of returning to the sky, Sam has to find a way to live on the Earth, has to try not to dream of the star he left behind, while dealing with the humans hunting for the blood of a star, said to be worth millions. Then a star hurtles to the ground while Sam’s looking skyward and his purpose on the Earth begins to reveal itself. Hope for a happy ending starts to spring from the hole the sky left in his chest.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'll keep this short! Huge thank you to an awesome beta, [ DreamsFromTheBunker ](https://dreamsfromthebunker.tumblr.com/)! Check out their fics [ hit_the_books ](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hit_the_books) for more awesome SPN fic!  
> Also, be sure to go leave kudos on the amazing artwork from [ Megibabe ](http://megibabe1.tumblr.com/)! It's posted [ here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10360908)! Check out their deviantArt [ here](http://megibabe.deviantart.com/art/Ballet-669789381) for more awesome art!
> 
> Be sure to check the warnings. There is major violence in this fic. With that out of the way, enjoy!

There was a crater miles wide and sunken into the Earth. For acres around, there were trees frost-covered and barren, empty of leaf and life. Closer to the crater, the snow had melted to mush and mud. The heart of the crater was burning, but it wouldn’t be for long. For a being so grand, their death had to match. Drawn out, cooling slow.

Across the world, there was a man that once was the center of a crater. Castiel spent his days inside an office typing at a computer his only companions a crooked tie and a trench coat. When he got home, he breezed through the living room where his roommates were clicking at keyboards beside each other, sharp elbows slicing through the empty space. In the air, all of their insults hovered, weighing heavy on Castiel’s chest. In his barren room, he changed into a t-shirt the color of midnight and sweatpants.

On the patio in the darkness, he clutched the edge of the roof and heaved himself up as quietly as possible. Had his roommates been silent, they wouldn't have heard a thing. He had done this many times before.

He tiptoed to the center of the roof where it flattened and on his back he laid, staring up at the sky. His fingers itched at his side. He tangled them in his t-shirt. He knew this was the closest he’d ever get to touching the home of midnight again.

“I used to be a star,” he whispered, and he watched his brethren flicker and blink above. He knew none of them were watching him, knew none of them had cared he was gone. He vaguely remembered his old life in the sky, but never thought about it by daylight. At night, he let himself remember. When the sun rose, he’d climb back into his house and pretend to sleep beside inside his locked bedroom while his roommates began to make breakfast.

One day in the future, he’d have to leave. He used to be a star. He didn’t age, wouldn’t age. He’d been on Earth for decades, but had met these guys five years ago. They’d notice his stagnancy only after they noticed their own disintegration. Their wrinkled eyes, the creaking of their wrists and knees and ankles. Castiel wouldn’t make a sound walking down the stairs. The guys would be all screaming bones. It wouldn’t be long now. They were breaching thirty, the pair of them. They’d start to show the age lines that Castiel would never have.

He had figured out how to be human while being part star, knew he couldn’t do anything to give his identity away. It was a dangerous business, being something so celestial. The blood of the stars was worth more than the moon. As he slid back into bed, he whispered, “I used to be a star.”

Maybe if he said it while his house was sleeping, it would know. Something had to. It drove him mad, being the sole container of what he used to be. The stars stopped thinking he was a brother the instant he fell. He had only stardust in his clogged veins to protest everything he used to be.

His alarm blared at his side and he pulled himself from the bed. The walls were the same, his window finger-smudged like always. If the house heard him, it cared not. Why should it matter if there was a star inside its walls? A star was nothing down here on Earth.

In the burning forest, the man in the crater blinked awake as the sun came up. He was burning, he was aching. His arms were splayed above his head, legs out straight. The shape of a shattered star from anyone looking from above.

There was blood seeping from a gash on his forehead, his body bloody and aching. He had no clothes, but he was not cold. He was still burning, after all.

Seeing the daylight and the empty sky, the man in the crater curled in on himself, tucking his shattered shoulder against his chest. He hadn’t much time. He knew, he knew. But, he sank into the dirt for just a moment anyways.

“I am a star,” he whispered into the emptiness and all the trees rattled. He could not see the stars above because of the sunlight, but he knew they all were there, resting in their invisibility. He knew none of them were looking for him all the way down here. He was a star, but he had lost the sky.

The man in the crater began to weep. He couldn’t see that, above, a star wept along with him.

* * *

Centuries ago, he was born in a flash of fire and pain. It felt like lifetimes, shattering and reborn second after second. There were others around him, screaming and beauty and birth, but he had little concept of time or being. Not yet, at least. For the first hundred years, this was all his life would ever be. Dying to birth. Born into death.

Then, there was an explosion. All of them went drifting, scattering across the galaxies as the Earth hurtled and spun below. Samuelon, a voice boomed through his heart, everything that made up his body. That’s all he heard from the creator. The rest: infinite confusion.

As he shifted to his place in the sky, he bumped other stars. They told him stories, whisper warnings as he passed.

There once was a star that glowed too bright, one said, and in punishment, they were cast down. The humans will want to consume you, they said.

Another warned Samuelon against going too dim, for it’s their place in the solar system to light the night. The humans will not know you exist, they growled, and what was a star that no one knew? Nothing, one said. Not a star at all.

They kept going, each one he passed offering more rules and stories and words of warning for his life in the sky. He had come from pain and fire, and now his world was full of things he couldn’t do. When he stopped drifting, finally found his place in the sky, there was nothing clearer than it had been before. Sam knew nothing about the ones who fall, but he had heard plenty of stories by the time he found his place.

* * *

Now he had fallen and nothing made sense. The sky was light, there was nothing familiar left.

“I am a star,” he whispered, but still the Earth was cold beneath him, still the sky stayed blank.

He fell asleep weeping and woke up two hours later, aching.

Something different lay beneath his skin too, something new. He was shivering, his body jittering, his fingers stiff and broken. Sam hadn’t ever been cold before, he hardly knew what the word meant until now. He knew, though, knew his heart was cooling. He had lost the heat of stars overnight and it left him empty inside. What was left of the world he knew? Little by little it fell away.

He blinked awake and it was nightfall. The stars glittered above and he began to remember more pieces. He remembered his star name, chose to call himself Sam instead. Felt an emptiness in his torso where gravity used to anchor him in the sky. The hollowness in his chest sent him scrambling from the earth, clawing his way up the walls of the crater he’d created with his fall, sheltering his shattered shoulder against his body while he made it to the top and rolled over to the edge. On his back, heaving, he stared at the sky.

“I am a star,” he said, louder this time.

He thought if he said it louder, one of his brethren would hear him. Would show him how to get home. To get back to everything he knew and loved.

But, nothing in the sky changed and nothing told him how to get back from this hell hole he’d fallen into. It was one he carved himself, he knew, though he wasn’t sure why it happened. No one above was watching and the ache in his chest split open and began to seep darkness through his gut. He laid at the top of his crater on the cold earth and stared at the home he had lost.

Around Sam, there were noises, confusion. It was being born again, bursting to flame and torn apart again. He cried. He wasn’t supposed to die twice, wasn’t supposed to live twice either. He was meant to be a star. Now, what could he be but broken?

After twenty four hours of weeping and darkness and sunlight with still no roadmap back home, Sam pulled himself from the ground. His shoulder stabbed pain through his back as he shoved himself from the dirt. His throat burned, a different kind of flame than his nursery, but a flame nonetheless. Sam took a breath with his unfamiliar lungs, and he began to walk. After a few hundred feet, he hit snow and it got all that much slower, his steps grew heavy, his feet going numb. From inside, he was still warm, the heart of a star living inside his chest, but the cold was overwhelming and foreign, slipping inside to swirl alongside his grief. Together, they’d send him toppling.

The sky was warming with the sun and the sting of the wind didn’t feel so much like an attack. A glance up, head tilting towards the warmth, Sam could see just how far away home was. He tucked his arm against his chest and bowed his head to walk.

The sun was close to setting when Sam stumbled, naked and shivering and broken, upon a tiny town with smoke billowing from their rooftops. There was a spike in his chest of fear, their voices loud and rough as they drifted from the center of the town. It was mayhem that he saw, heads thrown back and loud chatter, and he didn’t understand most anything.

From the corner of his eye, a woman in a police uniform approached, stepping gently as her boots crunched on the snow.

“Hey,” she said. Her hand was outstretched, pulled free from her glove. Sam could see her skin starting to pink. See the tremble as cold seeped beneath her palms. She stepped closer, eyes wavering. Sam jerked away, wincing as he jarred his shoulder. He stumbled back, moving back towards his crater and the sky and the only pieces that were in any way familiar. He’d heard stories of when stars and humans meet. He’d heard stories of stars drained of their blood.

“Wait,” the stranger said, reaching out a hand. “Please, wait. Let me help you. What’s your name?”

Sam shook his head, still moving backwards through the tree and snow cover. He tripped on a branch and went tumbling, his shoulder splintering beneath the weight of his fall. He tried to get up, but the pain had his stomach churning, vision scattering into the stars he used to belong to. He retched onto the ground and the stranger’s boots appeared on the edge of his swimming vision.

“Please. Let me help.” Her hands were gentle on his back as she steadied him, walking him to her brick-stacked home. “I’m Jody,” she said. “I can help you.”

* * *

A normal day, hundreds of years ago, in Sam’s younger years, he’d been minding his own business as he did, shining and doing his star thing. Near him, though, a star began to glow much too brightly. The star was angry at the sun for eclipsing them all in brightness, angry his name didn’t end up in the breathless whispers of more humans. They could hear it when humans said their names, could feel it tug inside their hearts.

He hadn’t been talked about in years by his count, though Sam doubted that. He was a cornerstone star in their constellation. One of the few the humans used to orient themselves. Sam would bet it had been less than a week since someone whispered the star’s name name, though he had been grumbling about it for days and days.

Now he was done. He began to beam through the night sky and Sam could feel the dread spread across his constellation. They had heard the stories, they knew what was to come. Before daylight arrived, the star was sent hurtling to Earth, a bright flash behind their minds, branded forever.

“Sucks,” a star nearby said. It was Gabriel, the closest star to Sam. They hadn’t spoken much, not yet anyway. Both of them were new and confused and trying to figure out how to survive alone before they could start finding their way with others. At least, that was Sam’s strategy. Gabriel’s seemed to be chattering his way through life and Sam had long since grown used to the chatter.

Now, though, it was directed at him. That was new. “Life down there is only suffering. Especially for our kind,” Gabriel continued.

“How do you know?” Sam asked.

“Don’t you watch them?” Gabriel asked. “Can’t you hear them when the night falls?”

“Who?” Sam asked, wracking his mind for a time he’d heard a star that had fallen from Earth. He couldn’t remember a time he’d heard anyone after they’d fallen. What reason would they have to pray to him?

“The humans,” Gabriel said. “How they weep.”

That night, Gabriel pointed out the suffering they could see and even after the night faded into day, there was still more to witness. Sam was convinced, Earth was hell for humans. He could only imagine the kind of torture it would be for those of them that knew what the sky tasted like before they fell.

“Bet you anything their tears are what made the oceans,” Gabriel said after the sun came up and they could relax for the sunlight hid them from sight.

“Why, then, do they keep going?” Sam asked, watching the Earth now in wonder. If all their life was was pain, why had they lasted so long? What reason was there for their clawing fight to survive?

Gabriel shrugged. “Don’t know. I’ve made myself a promise to never find out.”

“I think maybe that’s a good idea,” Sam said. He, too, made a promise never to fall, never to find out what it felt like to be human. He’d operate in the rules, it wouldn’t be so hard. There were millions of stars and most of them never fell until they were burnt out and mere dust by the time they reached the surface of the Earth. He’d just do as they did and complete his job as he was told.

* * *

Jody bandaged his arm with a sling and some wrap, cleaned the gashes on his forehead with a liquid that burned before it felt better. Sam thought that was fitting down here. Even the things that were supposed to heal made him wince.

Sam let her finish without a word, eyeing her house while she patched him up. It was small, the room she brought him into. There was a couch in the center, worn with wear and the color of Earth after rain. The walls were the dark gray the sky looked when the sun was still setting, but colder. Like the warmth had been drained out.

Against the center wall was the TV and it flashed out light while Jody worked on his wounds, inspecting the rest of his body with sharp eyes. She found nothing more to tend to.

“Okay, we’re all done cleaning up your wounds. Your shoulder will be sore for a few weeks, but this sling should help with the healing,” she explained.

Her hands were gentle as she tucked his arm into the cloth and wrapped it around his neck, suspending his arm against his side. Instantly, the pressure was relieved, though it still twinged with pain when he moved. She was fiddling with the strap around his neck, tightening it to the right height when he spoke.

“I’m Sam. That’s all I know.”

She nodded and continued to shift the straps until it was positioned comfortably. “Okay, Sam,” she said, “let’s get you some clothes and then I’ll rummage up some grub. First, I’m going to check your vitals, okay? Make sure there’s no internal damage from whatever happened to you.”

Sam flinched when she held her fingers against his neck. She pulled back immediately, worry in her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re doing,” Sam said.

“Okay,” Jody said. “I’m going to check your pulse, okay? I’ll take my fingers and press them against your neck to count your heartbeats. Is that okay?”

Sam nodded, still unsure, and held still while her fingers sank against his skin, her mouth moving in the silence that followed. She frowned when she was done, moved her fingers to another spot on his neck. Then another. For the next few minutes, Jody tested inches of his skin all across his body and found a pulse every time. He was a star, his heart was everywhere, but Jody couldn’t have known that. Unless what Sam had heard was wrong. Unless the humans knew more than what had filtered up to them all the way in the sky.

Regardless, she said nothing and moved on to check his temperature. He didn’t know what she was looking for, but her face remained blank despite the heat seeping from his skin. In a few months, he’d be much cooler. A year, cooler still. She pulled out a cuff to check his blood pressure.

“Husband had low blood pressure, got lots of use out of this thing. Used to, anyhow,” she said as she pumped up the cuff and it squeezed Sam’s good arm. For a moment, he began to panic at the pressure, thinking he’d lose that arm too and then be at this stranger’s mercy. Jody sensed his panic.

“Sam? It’s okay, it’s almost over. Watch, the air’s leaking out right now,” she said. As she did, the air started to spill from a notch on the cuff and the pressure let up gradually. Sam relaxed as best he could into the couch while she finished checking him over. Satisfied, she left him in the room alone while he listened to her rummage through drawers somewhere else in the house.

On the TV, dancers flashed, spinning in circles like the planets he used to know, swirling and gliding and in complete control. Sam watched, mesmerized, and thought of the way the stars danced by night, and how the dance changed by day. Jody reemerged with clothes in hand and Sam wandered into the bathroom at her direction.

When he came out, Jody was standing at the stove with steam drifting into her face and, at the sound of his footsteps, she half-turned. She pointed at the barstools in the kitchen pushed against a floating countertop. “Poured you some water, drink up,” she said. “You need to rehydrate.”

Sam took a sip of the water and then gulped the whole thing down after it soothed the burning in his throat.

“Thanks,” he said, remembering the word from the humans he watched. He’d begun to understand what the humans had been talking about for hundreds of years, making connections between the words they spoke and the things he now touched with his own human fingertips.

Jody placed a plate of noodles covered in white sauce in front of him, steam drifting. Sam looked up, seeing her staring at him with a small smile.

“Take a bite,” she said. “If you don’t like it, we can try something else.”

Sam took a tentative bite, finding the warmth first before the creamy sauce hit his tongue. His stomach growled and he dug in, unused to human things like hunger. He knew what they meant now and he had only just become human. How strange it was to suffer daily. How did they manage this every day?

Jody slid onto the seat beside him, with her bowl in front of her. She had less food than Sam, and spent more time watching than eating her own food. Sam didn’t comment, didn’t say anything at all. The sun was long set outside the window behind Jody’s stove and Sam stared out, searching for anyone he knew, for any sign of recognition or response.

“Where’d you come from?” Jody asked.

“Somewhere very far from here,” Sam said, bending his head back down to his noodles as his voice shattered. How could he tell her just how far he meant? How would she understand the distance he had crossed, the distance he had to try to climb back just to get home?

“Do you have a family? Anyone I can call?”

Sam shook his head. “I don’t think they’re my family anymore.”

“Who's fault was it?” she asked, and Sam knew she didn’t know, but the question applied all too well. Who’s fault was it that he fell? Whose could it be but his own?

“I fell,” he said, and she nodded because she sort of understood. He failed, was what she heard and Sam supposed that was true enough. There wasn’t a better word for it. If only she knew how right she was.

He couldn’t tell her the truth. Some of the humans envied the sky so much they wanted to tear it down with their hands. Sam didn’t want to imagine what they’d do if they knew a piece of it was within reach. Jody had proved herself nice enough, but one night wasn’t enough to trust her with his heart nor his heartbreak. Not when he’d been skybound for centuries and still they’d betrayed him.

Jody made him a bed on the couch and turned off all the lights so the only thing he could see was starlight drifting through the window. He fell asleep staring at it, hoping it would give him answers. Ones that never came.

In the morning, Jody led Sam into the bathroom after making him pancakes and bacon, both he found delicious. She handed him a towel and a new stack of clothes. “You remember how to shower?” she asked, voice steady. She would not judge him, no matter his answer.

Sam shook his head. “I don’t remember anything.”

“Okay,” she said. Jody reached a hand out, hesitating before it fell as Sam flinched ever so slightly. “It’s alright.”

She turned on the water, sending it raining down like the fracturing of meteors Sam used to watch. Like the clouds Gabe and him used to watch water the Earth below and make it flower. He wondered what would happen to his skin after the rain settled, wondered if there were any flowers living inside this shell he found himself in.

Jody saw his paralysis and nodded her head. With gentle fingers, she tugged the t-shirt she had given him from over his head, helped him step out of the rest of his clothes without a pause. She handed him a bottle, told him to run the liquid over his hair and his body and to rinse it all off before he got out. She showed him how to turn the water off and then made to leave. Sam didn’t wait before he stepped beneath the spray and a sigh fell from his lips. The warmth felt like space again, heavy and singing. It felt like he was a star again. For one moment, it felt like he hadn’t lost anything at all.

Jody’s breath hitched at the door and his eyes sprang open from where they’d been soaring through the space blooming beneath the warmth. He frowned, finding the bathroom dull and yellow-stained. When he met her eyes, she nodded towards his chest, eyes wide.

Sam looked down to find his skin glowing, streaking his veins into a warmthless bright beacon. This is how stars show their feelings, shining. Apparently it was how half-stars did too.

“Best keep that private,” Jody mumbled before shutting the door behind her and a spike of fear surged through Sam’s gut. He washed as quickly as he could despite the pain. The magic was lost. She had seen him glowing. She had seen what he was. Had she figured it out? Had she gone to find a weapon? Was she waiting on the other side of the door to take his blood? Panic sent the glow fading from his veins.

He yanked on the clothes Jody had left for him, grasping at the handle to turn the water off. His hands were sliding against the metal. When had his eyes grown so blurry, Sam didn’t know. All he knew was the damn handle wouldn’t work.

“Sam?” Jody knocked on the other side of the door. “Sam, is everything alright?”

Sam’s shaking hands wouldn’t fucking work, water cascading down his hair as he tried and tried to turn the water off. He sank down onto the tile against the tub, trying still to get it to end. None of this world made sense. None of it felt like home.

“Sam?” Jody eased the door open to find Sam soaked in his second set of clothes, hand still gripping at the handle. She hurried over, turning the water all the way off and stepping into the tub in front of Sam where he was curled around his knees. “What happened?”

“I thought-” he started, then he shook his head. He tightened his shaking hands around his knees. “You saw and I thought, and then the handle wouldn’t work and-”

Jody looked stunned, and she cursed under her breath. “Sam,” she said, her hands taking Sam’s from his knees and squeezing them hard. “I should have made this clearer before. I don’t care where you come from. I don’t care if your veins glow or your skin melts in the sun. I’m here for you. Whatever you need. Yeah, I was stunned, it was pretty fucking beautiful, but don’t ever think I’ll let anyone hurt you, myself or otherwise.”

Sam met her eyes and found them full of more fire than the sun. She would protect him, fiercely. It was more than the sky had done for him.

“Understand?” Jody asked. Sam nodded and she let his hands curl around his knees again. “Good. Now, shall I bring dinner in here?”

“Actually,” Sam whispered. “Now that you’re here, do you think you could show me how to make the water hotter?”

“Hotter?” she asked. “Sure. You sure you’re okay?”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Glad to hear it. Now, let’s get you some hot water.”

Sam let himself unfurl again beneath the steaming water for far too long. And afterwards, Jody showed him how to twist his hair up into his towel so it would dry faster. She made them dinner, a few burgers and french fries fresh from the oven.

When they finished, Sam tried to clean the dishes for her, making a mess all over the floor with the water and soap. Jody laughed, both of them sliding in the suds, while she clung to Sam’s hands for stability. She was laughing as she said it was alright, that the floor could use a good cleaning. The dishes could wait until morning.

That night, as she made to turn off the light in the living room, Sam stopped her. “Wait.”

She turned, hand on the doorframe. In the moonlight, she looked softer. Bags beneath her eyes. Sam hadn’t thought about the stress of taking someone in. Of the extra work she’d been putting in.

“Thank you,” he said.

She nodded. A small smile. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

* * *

Once, there was a meteor shower in the parts of space nearby Sam’s constellation. Everyone was thrumming, it meant all eyes would be on them, or near anyway. It meant more humans would know they existed, more would remember them after too. They could hear it when humans said their names, could hear it when they prayed to them. More eyes meant more chances to inspire those on the Earth, to give them a friend amongst all the darkness of the sky.

Sam paid the shower no attention to the people looking his way, caring more for watching the meteors fall and crash than trying to attract attention. He hadn’t ever been bright enough to get much attention anyhow.

He was minding his own business when the sound of a child whispering his name, threaded in wonder, surged from the planet below. It flooded his heart, his body, everything that made the sky beautiful seemed to exist inside that young girl’s voice.

“Samuelon,” she said. “Beautiful.”

Sam was struck by it all, wondering why he hadn’t thought it meant anything at all before when now it felt like the only reason to exist. He couldn’t help a slight jump in his glow. Nothing excessive, but something grander and brighter, more alive.

“Feels good doesn’t it,” a voice broke his glow. It was Gabriel. Sam let his grin stay.

“Yeah, I suppose it does. Didn’t think it meant anything.”

Gabriel laughed. “It’s always the kids, isn’t it? So full of wonder. It’s disgustingly cute.”

“Maybe there’s a little more down there than suffering,” Sam said.

“Only little moments,” Gabriel said. “Trust me. Say, you up for a challenge?”

“What did you have in mind?” Sam asked.

“Let’s see who gets more mentions. Winner gets to say they’re more beautiful until the next meteor shower.”

Sam grinned, jittering in his place. “You’re on.”

He knew it was a lost cause, Gabriel was the most beautiful in their constellation. Bright and bold and always dancing. Sam was warming, dimmer, less attention grabbing. He knew instantly he’d lose, but he couldn’t help but join in on the fun. What were his days but only ever the same thing? This, this could make things more fun.

Gabriel looked at Sam with a grin, and began to dance, flickering and swirling. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Sam said, and he too started a dance. It was less flashy, less looping, but he danced nonetheless. He went for gentle, went for smooth and simple, and sliding.

Gabriel moved closer, starting to mirror Sam’s movements, but in his own style. Sam, too, started to mirror his and soon it was no longer a mirror and more of a duet.

It was easy. It was seamless. No more effort than his birth and far less painful than his beginnings. It was just him and Gabriel and the whispers swirling around them both. Gabriel, Samuelon, melting until neither of them could tell the difference between their names anymore. Melting until they didn’t hear the words anymore, just danced and danced.

Suddenly, it was daylight and it took hours until Sam noticed. He stopped dancing, Gabriel following suit, as Sam finally stopped to catch his breath. Metaphorically, of course.

“So?” he asked.

“So?” Gabriel said.

“Who won?” Sam asked, hiding the fact that he hadn’t cared a bit until the magic stopped.

Gabriel jumped up, the star-version of a shrug. “I did.”

“How do you figure that?” Sam asked. “What were your numbers?”

“Don’t know, wasn’t counting,” Gabriel said.

“So, why should you be the winner?”

“I got your attention, didn’t I?”

It took Sam by surprise, but he wouldn’t let his blush glow. Much, anyway. He couldn’t help the little bit that came along with it. He rolled his eyes at Gabriel, but the glow remained. Stayed and stayed.

The next night, as soon as the sun sank close to the horizon and his constellation was visible, Gabriel began to dance.

“Join me, Sam,” he called out.

“The competition’s over,” Sam said back.

“Don’t care. Join me,” Gabriel said. “Have a little fun with me for nothing but the fun of it.”

Sam paused, one moment, and he began to dance.

For weeks after, their names were on hundreds of lips. Neither of them noticed. Neither of them cared. But, night after night, they danced and danced and broke apart long after morning had sent the rest of their constellation to sleep. Sam figured, what was the life of a star, if there wasn’t any fun in it? So, he danced with Gabriel and had more fun than he ever thought there was for stars like him, hidden inside his constellation.

He’d dance with Gabriel every night.


	2. Chapter 2

Sam was trying to put the dishes away while Jody was at work. She’d be home soon, but he knew he should do something, anything, to repay her. He didn’t know how to cook, didn’t trust himself to attempt anything on the computer. He was a smart man, he’d been a smart star, and he knew that sorting out what all the buttons on the screen was way too outside his skill-set to try. Like he said, he was a smart man. Or at least he had thought he was when he chose to do the dishes instead of anything more grand.

He had to do them one-armed, sling still tucking his right arm against his chest, rendering it mostly useless. With his free hand, Sam washed and dried the dishes no problem, looking out the little window at the setting sun as he did so. He watched it sink from an angle he hadn’t seen yet, spending every sunset since he fell struggling to survive or stuck inside Jody’s place. He hadn’t been looking for beauty while he learned how to be human. It was strange, how different it looked from on Earth than above it. It made him feel smaller here, like it would swallow him whole. Like no one would ever say his name with wonder again.

When he finished drying them, Sam set about, barefooted, to put them away. He was stretching for the highest shelf, much more able to reach it than Jody would ever be because of his height, and the sun disappeared. Out the window, a star flickered and Sam’s heart sank inside his hollow, hollow chest. The plate in his hand shattered against the tile at his feet, but he hardly cared. Not yet. His eyes were on the window, searching the sky for that blink again.

“Gabriel,” he whispered. If he knew Gabe was up there, still shining, maybe he could tell him how to get back. Sam wasn’t even sure Gabriel would still be skybound, not after his fall. He had assumed it had been them both, fallen together for the way they’d grown so close. Part of it broke him, seeing Gabriel in the sky still. But seeing him, if only for a moment, made it easier to breathe. Gabriel hadn’t loved him, or he would have fallen to. But down here was suffering and Sam knew he’d give anything to keep Gabriel safe in the sky.

“Sam,” Jody’s voice broke his concentration and the sky looked no different than it had nights before. Whatever he’d seen, whoever it was, was gone from sight. “Sam,” Jody said, boots crunching towards him. “Don’t move.”

Sam looked down at the shards of the plate scattered around his feet to see that, in his haste, he’d stepped atop some of the glass, he could feel them inside his skin. Pain was a new thing. Sharper every time.

Jody helped him sit on the countertop, retrieved tweezers from her bathroom. She held one foot in her palm while balancing on her toes, boots still laced on her feet.

As she pulled the shards out of his skin, Sam slammed his fist against the counter. His life had been grand. What was it now but destroyed by things as small as glass.

“It’s okay, Sam” Jody said. “You’ll be okay.”

Sam bowed his head, fist falling limp over the counter’s edge. Even his anger couldn’t rattle the house like it could before. It hardly burned at all. “I am a star,” Sam whispered.

Jody’s breath caught, but she said nothing. After a moment, she nodded her head and let his foot fall against the counter despite the tiny pieces of glass still stuck inside. In an instant, Sam was enveloped in her arms, close enough to her chest to hear her heartbeat. So very gentle. So very human.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered against his neck, running her hands over his back in circles. “I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t know how to find my way back,” he whispered. It was an ocean of loss and he didn’t know how to find a way to breathe. How funny, he never had to breathe before and now, because he had lost everything, he had lungs that refused to give up no matter how often he willed them to stop.

“I don’t know how to help you,” she said. “Is there anything I can do?”

Sam shook his head as she pulled away, wiping the grief from his eyes. “Tell me everything you know.”

She bent back down to his feet, digging the rest of the pieces out. As she set them in a glass bowl by her side, she began to speak.

“There are stories, though I’m not sure that’s all they are,” she began. Glass clinked against the bowl. “There are stories of humans searching the globe for stars that fell like you.”

“Why?” Sam asked. Clink.

“Greed. Your blood is worth millions, or so they say. Your heart, priceless.”

“Funny,” Sam said. “My whole body is a heart.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s the thing. They’ll take all of you for money in their bank account.” She finished one foot, moved on to the next.

“Sam,” she said, looking him in the eye. “Listen to me. You can’t let them take all of you. You hear me? You have to keep yourself safe.”

Sam nodded. He’d heard about the dangers, he’d watched a war or two. It was no surprise the humans would kill him too. They’d kill their own for far less than millions. His blood alone was worth ten times that.

“Once,” Sam said. “A friend and I watched a war down here. It was centuries ago. Feels like yesterday and yet so very far away.”

He and Gabriel had watched for years as the humans below threw themselves at each other and stained the Earth red. Flowers grew from the blood, trees and houses sprang up. Built on a graveyard, built on pain. Sam wondered if it felt different to live atop somewhere people died like that, weeping.

“They are monsters,” Gabriel had said. “Every single one of them.”

Sam shook his head. “They care.”

Gabriel snorted, doing a little circle of a jig. “That’s never a good thing, Sam.”

Sam watched Gabriel laugh, watched him swirl and dance. Ached for the night so they could dance again. Sam looked at Gabe and said, “I’m not so sure you’re right.”

“You want to be down there?”

“No,” Sam said. “Of course not. I’m just saying. Maybe it’s not so bad to care about something.”

“Suppose it depends on what it is you’re talking about caring for,” Gabriel said.

Once, they’d danced all through the daylight and the night fell before either of them realized. Sam thought about that. “Wonder what they’re caring about so much they’d die for it.”

Gabriel shrugged. “Can’t be anything worth it. Why would they let themselves care so much they’d die for it? Kill their brothers? There’s nothing I’d ever let myself care about that much.”

“No?” Sam asked.

“No.” Gabriel said. “Is there anything that’s worth all that suffering?”

Sam didn’t know how to respond, didn’t know what to say at all. He was starting to think maybe there was something worth it, but it wasn’t a thought he could have for long. Not if Gabriel didn’t think the same thing.

“There has to be something worth a little bit of pain,” Sam said. That night, he didn’t dance. Gabriel didn’t ask why.

In the kitchen, Jody finished pulling pieces from Sam’s feet and patched up the wounds that spattered blood on her kitchen floor. He leaned forward, willing her eyes to find his. “Is there?” he asked.

“Is there what?”

“Is there anything worth all this suffering?” he asked. He needed her to say yes, this journey he’d just started too muddled to take on without any semblance of hope.

“I’m not sure,” Jody said. “I hope so.”

“Me too,” Sam said. She helped him down from the counter, walked him to the couch. He listened as she swept the glass pieces across the tile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was trying to help.”

“It’s okay, Sam. No biggie. How’re you feeling?”

“I think it’s time to move on,” he said, burying his face in his hands. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.”

Jody set the broom down, came to sit next to Sam. “You don’t sound ungrateful. It had to happen eventually, much as I like having you around. We’ll get you all ready to move on, find your own place in the world. Remember me though, okay?”

“Of course,” Sam promised. “Now, I’ve just got to figure out where to go.”

“For that, I think I’ve got an idea. Well, more of a general direction. I’ll get some stuff together for you, too. Food, water, map, that kind of thing. We’ll get you on your way.”

“Thank you,” Sam said. “For everything.”

“Of course, Sam. Of course.” Jody got back up and swept the kitchen clean of all of the mess Sam had left. She sank onto the couch beside him once she was done, flipped on the TV.

“Find anything on this thing you like yet?” Jody asked. “Everyone’s got their thing.”

Sam shrugged, thinking about the show he’d seen earlier, backlit, people on a dark stage. The light was bright on their skin, slick lines and close clothing. They were frozen, and then the music began and they were flying around the stage, swirling, fluid and weightless.

“Come on,” she said, seeing the look on his face as Sam stared at the blank TV, replaying the show from earlier. “What was it?”

She handed him the remote and Sam took it in his palm, weighing the plastic, cold against his cooling skin. In the dark, without meeting Jody’s eye, he flipped the channel, one by one, searching for those bodies and how they flew.

He landed on the channel, watching in wonder as a woman joined a man on stage, dressed in all white. She looked like Poppy, Polaris, the North Star. He was struck by the similarity as she began to twirl. At first, it was all frozen feet, fluid hands. Then, then, she began to slide on her toes, circle through the air. She crossed the stage in leaps and the man tossed her into the air, holding her hips. They were stars colliding, they were infinite. Sam’s chest ached for what he watched, ached and he wasn’t so sure he’d ever feel right again.

Jody, ever so gently, pried the remote from Sam’s hands and patted his shoulder. “You should see it in person sometime. It’s stunning.”

“You can see this in person?” Sam asked, breathless.

“You can dance it yourself, if you like.”

At that, Sam turned his head and stared at her, wide eyed. He thought he had lost dancing, thought it was for the humans who had earned the right like Poppy had earned her place. There had always been so many rules. Now he was wandering in a place that seemed without.

She nodded, moving into her bedroom. “Come on in,” she called. “Let me show you.”

On the computer screen, she had pulled up hundreds of videos, some of children, others of adults, in all colors skin and suit. They were bowed, lying in the center of a stage, giggling from their tiled kitchens. “Okay, so what you’re watching is ballet, but there are a lot of different dance styles. Hip hop, jazz, tap dance, the list is endless. Here, I’ll let you explore a little.”

She left him alone in front of the computer, shutting the door to her bedroom behind her. For a few minutes, he could hear her clattering around the kitchen, cooking up some food for them both. Then, he heard nothing but the notes, saw nothing but the bodies. It wasn’t quite the dance of stars, but Sam could feel the itch from before. The itch to move. His body was different, though, he wasn’t so sure it would work with this body the same way it did as a star. He could watch, though. Watch he did.

Jody snuck inside on tip-toes and set a plate of spaghetti in front of Sam. He took a few bites, but mostly it was left untouched long into the morning. He fell asleep dreaming of pointed toes and hands turned into swans.

Jody came home the next day to find Sam sprawled on the couch, watching, again, the ballet. She didn’t know much about it, if she was being honest, but she was trying her best to show him how to learn more. If that’s what he found comfort in, after falling so far, she’d make the world a little more easy to manage for him.

“Hey, still at it?” She asked, coming further into the room. Sam jerked up, wiping his eyes with the back of his hands. He’d been thinking about home while the ballet played. The room around him had been dark and silent, he was alone in the world and he could not figure out how not to be any longer.

“It’s still beautiful,” he said.

She laughed. “I don’t think it will ever stop being beautiful.”

“No?” Sam asked.

“No,” Jody said, smiling. “How do you feel about pizza?”

“Sounds good to me,” Sam replied. They’d had it the week before and he’d liked it well enough. It seemed to be a popular thing in the area, catching three stores alone when he’d gone walking one night beneath the stars, searching for Gabriel. He was careful to tuck his skin beneath hoodies and sweatpants, just in case he found Gabriel and the glow came back.

He hadn’t found Gabriel. All he’d done was sweat and swear and come home sad.

“You still thinking about taking off?” Jody asked. “No pressure, just asking for asking’s sake.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I think I need to find my way back home, however that may happen.”

She nodded. “I’ll help you find the North Star, it’ll give you a reference point at least.”

She froze. Sam rolled his eyes at her, flickering his glow from inside his veins. They both began to laugh. “Her name’s Poppy,” Sam said. “She was my friend.”

“Whereabouts were you?” Jody asked, softer and closer than she’d been before.

“Come on.” He held out his hand.

Jody took it softly, followed Sam out the front door and down the driveway until they were standing in the middle of the asphalt street. Sam craned his neck up and up, finding the ones he had called home not so long ago.

The ones he had loved. The ones he had lost.

“There,” Sam pointed.

Jody stared up, wordless, and in one smooth movement sat down in the middle of the road, tugging Sam down by his wrist. She laid back, head against the roughness. She didn’t seem to care.

Sam followed suit, laying back and staring up. After a moment, it was almost like there wasn’t anything but the sky stretching for miles. It was almost like he’d made his way back. He was drowning in the starlight and darkness. He was home.

Above, there was a flicker. “Did you see that?” he said, but it was far too quiet for even Jody to hear. There was a flicker, he’d swear he knew who it belonged to. Maybe, if he kept laying here, he’d see it again. Maybe, if he layed here long enough, Gabriel would feel him looking and show him the way home.

“Gabriel,” he whispered. “Gabriel.”

There was a light flicked on, more than a moment. It wasn’t a trick of the eye anymore.

“Gabriel,” Sam said, louder.

“Oh, car,” Jody said, standing up and sending the world he’d gained back all tumbling down again. She held out a hand as headlights drew closer down the street. Sam glanced up, sharp. “I don’t think they were close enough to see anyhow,” Jody said, but she shuttled Sam inside hurriedly nonetheless. Better safe than sorry. Better hidden than dead.

Sam didn’t care, he was still among the stars wondering if all he’d ever have from his last life was flashbacks and tiny moments that crushed him to pieces each time.

When the door was shut, she came up behind Sam, hands on his shoulders. “You okay?”

Sam shook his head. “I don’t know how to be with so many pieces missing.”

“You’ll find that you thought you needed a lot more than you do to survive,” Jody said. Sam had seen the picture frames on her bedside table, had seen the ring tucked away in the closet with all those boxes full of men’s clothing. He wondered how she lost them, how she made it through with a heart still beating.

“I’m starting to think I want to do more than survive,” Sam said, sinking onto the couch.

“Yeah,” Jody said. “Me too.”

She sighed, sitting at his side. “Having you here has helped. More than you know.”

Sam winced. “And now I’m talking about leaving.”

She shook her head. “Don’t apologize. It’s enough to have been a part of this, no matter how little.”

“Trust me,” Sam said. “There was nothing small about how you helped me these last few weeks. I wouldn’t have made it without you.”

He gestured to his shoulder, slingless and sore, but healing. He gestured to his feet, but he meant everything that there was to mean. Every meal and kind word. Everything she’d done since they met was a kindness he couldn’t comprehend. She was a star the sky was unlucky enough never to have. Sam could see it now, Jody glowing soft and sure night after night, there for the lonely and the wandering. For those who needed a kind friend amongst all the chaos of space.

“Now,” Jody said, sniffling at his side. He didn’t turn, he’d give her a moment. “Let’s order some pizza.”

They watched ballet on the couch, dripping grease down their throats. It was nice and so very tragic. Sam had found some comfort, and now he was leaving it behind. He had to. He had to find a way home.

The next day when Jody came home, she had bags of granola bars and a backpack with a clip across the chest, maps of the United States and more money than he could think about accepting.

“Poppy’s north, remember that,” she said. They packed his backpack together at the kitchen table and when they were done, Jody pulled something else out of her purse. It was an envelope, she put it into Sam’s hands.

“For you,” she said. “Don’t ever stop thinking it’s beautiful.”

She retreated to her room, shutting the door behind her. Inside the envelope were tickets to a performance of Swan Lake at a stage a state over, the performance in two months. There was a note, too, inside.

_No need to take me along, but I’m there if you like. Dress nice. Let this be your motivation when things get hard._

Sam wanted to weep. He held the tickets in his fingers, sliding his thumb across the smoothness of the paper. It was a thicker sort of paper, glossy and shining. He was going to a real ballet.

He decided there and then to tuck the second ticket somewhere Jody would find it. Sam walked over to the fridge, grabbed a magnet and pasted it on the front. He went about the rest of his night, vowing to leave at nightfall the day after. Even when the outside world seemed so sharp in comparison to this little home he’d stumbled on.

Jody hugged him when the sun went down the next day, making sure he had everything he could need.

“You have your extra clothes rolled up to save room?”

“Yes,” Sam said, standing on the doorstep.

“And you split that extra money into different pockets, just in case?”

“Jody, yes,” Sam said, grinning.

“Oh, and-”

“I’m going to be okay,” Sam said, pulling her into a hug. “And so will you.”

“I’m not the one I’m worried about,” she said against his chest, and he pulled her tighter before letting her go.

“Goodbye,” said Sam, and then he turned his back to Jody, backpack shifting with each step. He began to walk away. Down the driveway, it was torture. Once he passed the limit of the streets he’d gone walking down, once he passed stores he’d never seen, once he wandered through the market he’d overheard his first day here, it was less hard. He was too focused on finding his way, now that he knew nothing and no one. He couldn’t reminisce when he was trying to survive.

The night was clear, though, as he moved further from town and he chanced a look up every now and again. At first, it was just to make sure he was moving in the right direction. The road was smooth and, when he let himself look for too long, it felt like gliding beneath the ocean sky again. He had only ever seen the ocean from above, and now he could only see the sky from where the oceans once swirled beneath him.

He walked until his human legs ached and he found a bed inside a small motel on the side of the road. It advertised working cable. He didn’t care for anything else.

Sam realized his mistake when the shower water was achingly cold and made him shiver for hours afterwards with his hair dripping down his back. It just made him feel all that much more human, that much more isolated. There was a thought, creeping, about how when planet’s cores cool they don’t ever burn again. They’re dead planets, and he couldn’t stand the thought of being dead like that, perpetually cold inside.

Sam didn’t stay for long, he slept for a few hours and was moving before the sun was. When it came up, when it finally hit his face, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He stood for a moment in the sunlight, asphalt under his walking boots, and let it sink in. Willed it to slide beneath the human exterior. Willed it to keep the heart of his star-self alive.

After one shuddering breath, he kept his legs moving, carrying him forward. As he moved away from town, there was emptiness, a car-dotted highway, and nothing much else but breeding ground for despair. He had been in the middle of the forest after all, it held it’s ground around Jody’s town.

A car slowed as night fell. Muddy tires, water-stained windshield. The man on the other side of the window looked like a corpse to Sam. “Hey, man, you need a ride?”

Sam remembered Jody’s warning, thought about what it would be to see himself looking like that man, pale and empty in a mirror. If he got in the car, breathed the smell of his life in, he’d never get back to the sky. There’d be no chance.  “No, thank you,” Sam said. “I like the walk.”

“Whatever,” the guy behind the wheel said and he sped off, kicking up dust. Sam blinked the pieces of asphalt and dirt from his eyelashes and stretched his shoulders. Then he began to walk again.

By the morning, there was a town within view and Sam spent many of the hours of sunlight walking towards it, head tilted skyward. He’d been walking forever, or so it seemed. It was numbing, the whole of it. He stopped on the threshold to the town, on the brink of tempting fate, and he stood, staring skyward.

“Gabriel,” he whispered. “Please.”

There was a star, awakened, in the spot Gabriel lived. It was, of course, Gabriel, alight in the rising of the sun.

“Hello Gabe,” Sam whispered, biting back tears that itched at his throat. There was a blinking back to him, miles away and infinities beyond anything Sam could have hoped for when he tilted his head skyward.

“How do I get to be a star again?” Sam asked after a moment of basking in the hope sprung free from his chest at the sight of Gabriel still skybound and shining.

But, Gabriel disappeared as the sky grew lighter and Sam had to be okay with what he had gotten. At least he knew Gabriel was alive. He could ask him how to get home another time. Headlights appeared at his back, speeding his way, and Sam started to move along the road again, head down towards the dirt.

He thought about the sky and the way Gabriel used to tease him in their quiet moments. Dancing and lilting, the winking of stars. Thought about what he would give to get back there again, for one more daylight dance with Gabriel. He’d carve out his heart for one more second. Give up everything there was to give. Gabriel was alive, he kept saying to himself. Gabriel was thriving. That alone was everything.

The headlights at his back grew closer, tires screeching against the asphalt. Sam stepped off the road, stepping into the treeline to watch them pass. He turned his head skyward again, searching, searching. He thought he saw a glimmer, but the car was screeching to a halt at his side and it was so very loud. Sam’s heart sank, panic surging through his chest.

Sam frowned, thinking maybe it was a coincidence. Waited for the passenger to lean over and heave, get out and take a piss amongst the trees. Anything to explain away the reason two men were scrambling towards Sam from the car they’d sped to his side.

The man on the passenger side glared at Sam, pausing a moment to grin a slow grin before he began to sprint. The driver rounded the car, following suit, thin-frame moving quickly atop the dirt.

Sam turned, backpack thudding against his back as he tore through the treeline, eyes scanning for anywhere he could hide. It had become a foot race to freedom he knew he’d lose. They had four feet, he had two. Sam cut through narrow openings, darted side-to-side, but he could hear their breathing grow close. The driver had passed his friend in the race, long arms reaching. Sam pictured them stretching, growing far too long, reaching into Sam’s chest to scoop out the heart that wasn’t there. A hand painting the ground with all the colors of his blood.

When they neared, when they grew so close he could hear the tall one’s grin split across his face, Sam knew he had to change his plan. Soon, he was lost in a mirage of hands. He wondered where they grew them all. Wondered why his chest hurt so damn bad.

Sam’s backpack fell off in the fight and he swung it halfheartedly towards the attackers, clipping one in the side of the head. He knew he had to think fast, knew the pain in his chest couldn’t have been good. He looked down and saw a handle sticking from where his heart would have been had he been human. They weren’t experienced. They didn’t know the money lay in Sam’s blood, his hearts the entirety of their bodies.

Sam looked skyward and saw a blink. He convinced himself it was Gabriel, telling him what to do. It had to be. So, as a punch sent his vision skittering, balance swaying on its axis, Sam began to glow, bright as he could in this convoluted body he found himself trapped inside. Still, it was bright enough to blind and blind them he did, burning them with the heat of his soul. Gabriel was out there. He couldn’t die now, not when he still had a chance.

“The fuck?” one man said, before the light began to burn. Sam realized then that it wasn’t his star parts they’d been after. Anyone would have done on the side of the road that day. They were out for blood, no matter whose it was. What a sad world he’d ended up inside. What a world so full of bleeding.

The men fell on the ground, clawing at their blistering faces. He hardly heard them screaming over the pain thumping through his ribcage. Sam pulled himself into a stand from where he’d been heaving, grabbing his backpack. He stumbled through the trees away. Away from the road and the cars and the people hunting his blood simply for where he came from and what he held inside. Away from the noise. From all of it.

When he was far enough that the headlights were specks in the distance and he couldn’t hear the men screaming anymore, he sank down against a tree, arm aching and chest aflame. With his good arm, he tugged on the handle of the knife. It hurt too bad, it felt like falling and birth all over again. He let his arm fall to his side.

He passed out and woke up in the sunlight unsure of anything there was to know. Not who he was or where he ended up or why his chest felt like he’d been split open and left gaping. That last one he solved quickly, one glance down showing the knife still sticking from inside his chest. In the daylight, he had no stars to urge him on, but he looked skyward anyway. He needed someone to tell him he had to do it. Someone to tell him it would be for the better to rip his chest open and let it bleed despite all the reasons he thought he shouldn’t give this goddamn greedy world another drop.

He wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the knife and turned his eyes skyward. “Please,” he whispered. “Anyone.”

There was a flicker just as he blinked and he didn’t open his eyes again. Just in case he’d imagined it. He convinced himself it was Gabriel, and he took a breath. One, two. Sam pulled the knife from his chest and let out the air he was holding onto as the blood began to flow. He dropped the weapon into the dirt at his side and put his hands over the wound trying to hold the most valuable part of him inside. He’d removed the blade, the killing thing, but was it worth the blood?

He opened his eyes as the blood pored through his fingers and he asked why. But the sky was blank and he had to stop the blood alone as the sun drifted at its leisure. With one hand over his wound, he fumbled with the zipper on his backpack. From inside, he pulled the first cloth he felt and pulled out a t-shirt to hold over the flow of blood. There wasn’t much else he could do, he held the shirt and bled into the dirt while the sky remained blank of anyone he loved. He was alone. He was bleeding out. To the world, he hardly existed. It wouldn’t help him one bit.

He passed out in pain and woke up in much the same manner. Now, he could hear a car whizzing by, tires creeping on dirt road. He hadn’t been paying attention when he’d run, had no concept for where he’d ended up. He realized he passed out far too close to the road he’d began on, running in a loop in his panic. The sun was drifting downward, flaring into the sky, and he closed his eyes knowing the stars would be awake soon. He didn’t want them to see him downed, didn’t want Gabriel to think him dead. He had to get up. Had to. There was no choice in the matter.

With a breath, Sam heaved himself upwards, one hand held to his chest. It wasn’t gushing blood, not any longer, but it was oozing and he felt better if his hand was there to staunch it. It felt too strange to keep his chest exposed to the world, too vulnerable in this world he was finding full of glass and blades.

With his other arm, he slung his backpack onto his shoulder, and as the first star blinked awake, he began to walk away from the sound of tires, deeper into the tree cover and darkness.

Every once in awhile, he let himself lean against the rough bark of tall trees with leaves the color of sunsets, and take a breath or two. Moved the t-shirt he had tied around his shoulder blade to rest against his chest where the knife wound was.

At one rest stop, he removed the shirt and found the wound disgusting, oozing and angry. He remembered the way Jody cleaned his feet, and he knew he needed to find a way to do the same for his chest. This time, the wound was worse. There was no one to help him soften the pain. He needed to clean it fast, find something more sterile to hide the wound from the outside world. He had no answers for anything he was searching for. He pressed the bloodied and stiff t-shirt back over the wound and tied the edges underneath his armpit to keep it covered as best he could.

It felt like hours before the sky was full and Sam knew that was probably true. Sometimes, it was instant, all of them awake. Sometimes it was hours, a crescendo of starlight. There was no rhyme or reason for it, but what they wanted to do. As long as they were awake by the deepest dark of the night, there was nothing else telling them when to light the sky. Beneath the tree cover, Sam found an opening, all the trees felled and rotting in the grass. He sat down against one, the bark crumbling against the weight of his back. He tilted his head and stared up, searching, searching for the one he loved.

He closed his eyes and was in the sky once more, watching Gabriel blink awake after him one day. He hadn’t wanted to wake him, hadn’t wanted to stop looking at the way he swayed even in starsleep. He was watching when the sky darkened, as it crept closer to darkest. Just when he started to worry, when he started to think he should get Gabriel up before he broke the rules and fell, Gabriel was awake and shining and all shades of stunning. The sparkle of starlight and something more beautiful still for the way he grinned at Sam the minute he awoke and found him watching.

“Morning,” Sam had called.

“Morning, Starshine Sam,” Gabriel said. That was the first time. There had been many a time those words passed through Gabriel after that. It was a joke, a tease, and something Sam held close in his star heart. He was Gabriel’s starshine even before he knew how much it meant to him.

Now, looking skyward, he whispered the words and pretended Gabriel was sending them down to Earth. He needed them now, the reminder of what he used to be in the eyes of Gabriel. At least what he thought he had been to him. There hadn’t ever been a confirmation, a statement of what it is they were for each other. There were stars that loved and stars that danced and Sam thought they were both, but he was never sure how Gabriel felt about it. He hadn’t ever thought to ask. They had had infinity. Now they had nothing but millions of miles of distance and too much time to reach through. He couldn’t find Gabriel. He stood up again.

It was still nighttime when he stumbled upon the river, and without thinking, he plunged himself within in. It was just a river. He hadn’t ever been in something with a current like the gravity of the sun. This, here, was a whisper of that. The way the water tugged on his ankles and waist and wrists as he waded in. This, he found himself thinking, felt like the echo of home. He stripped his clothes and hung them over branches to dry, laying on his back and drifting through the water. He had known Saturn for awhile long ago. He spun through the sky slow, spending many human years inside Sam’s constellation. He said once that he’d float if there ever was a swimming pool big enough to jump into. Sam floated on his back and thought about that, how Saturn would love this.

He had lost track of time since he fell to Earth, had no idea where Saturn would be now. He sent him a salute to the sky and closed his eyes to float in the closest thing to home he’d felt in days or weeks or whatever it was since he’d been skybound. It was an eternity, whatever the number may have been.

Because the water stung so, Sam thought about Saturn’s lightness as he washed the blood from his wound, tried to be something far grander and softer than he’d ever been in his life. He’d become a planet, strong and sturdy. Large and magnificent. He’d become anything to get through this pain.

When his skin was puckering from the water, he pulled himself from the current and sank onto the riverbank to dry beneath the stars. If Gabriel was up there, he’d see him floating, he’d see him free.

From here, he could hear nothing close to human. Sam decided to sleep there by the riverside. The dirt clung to his skin, but he knew he could wash it away with the blood and the pain, the water flowing all through the night. He didn’t sleep long, couldn’t for a reason he didn't know. It was most likely the fear, too open and exposed. He was naked, his chest open. He had to find somewhere sheltered to feel safe enough to sleep, though the thought of losing sight of the stars had panic singing his veins. Could he not have both, while he tried to climb the sky again?

In the early daylight, he pulled on his dry clothes and tied the shirt around his wound once again. No longer stiff, the fabric felt almost nice against his wound. It wasn’t rubbing sores into his skin at least.

The trees were light in the pinkness of the sleepy sky, his steps the only sound beyond the rustling in the wind. There was no aim for his feet as he had no aim for his destination. They’d carry him wherever they may. No one had ever told him how to get back to the sky once he’d lost it. There hadn’t been whispers about that.

He was looking at his feet, the sun brightening into something too sharp to look at, when he found the tin-roofed shed on the outskirts of a tiny town. He could see the buildings in the distance, the shed a surprise he’d stumbled on that sent adrenaline coursing. Last time he’d been in a town, he’d found Jody. Last time he’d met humans, his chest was carved open. What would this place bring?

He vowed to investigate by nightfall, knowing there was safety in the darkness. Instead, he shut himself in the tiny shed where he found shattered pots for flowers and a rusted set of shears, a shelf of packages of seeds fading from weather and age. On the floor, he set his backpack and, on it he sank, settling with his legs propped up against the door to sleep. There were cracks scattered across the shed’s walls, he’d hear it if anyone approached. His legs would let him know if anyone tried to push open the door. He was covered. Safe enough, though it was cramped. He could sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

His legs were tingling and heavy when he blinked awake. All his limbs were stiff and his chest ached and ached each time he moved or breathed. Pulling his legs from the door, he let them regain feeling for a few moments while he stretched his arms out at his sides, brushing each side of the room with his fingertips. This could not be where he stayed, it was too small for a star. He needed air, he needed room to shine, to grow. Somewhere he could be alive. In this shed, he’d suffocate and fade like all the packages of seeds that lined the walls.

When his legs were back to normal, he stretched those too, thinking about those dancers he’d seen warming up before their performance, all long limbed and unrestrained. He longed for that in this still-foreign body. Longed to know how to make it move to his liking. If he had room, he could try. When he was whole again, he would. Until he found the sky, he’d try to dance on the Earth. Just to show Gabriel he was still dancing. Just to prove he was still thinking about him all the way down there.

It was all shades of darkness when he peered through the doorway, darker still when he let the door hang open letting the night inside. He took a breath, steeled his skin, and moved into the night, towards the town of unknown.

* * *

Gabriel had been dancing light and swirling and carefree in the sun. Sam, laughing, watched him across their space of sky, dancing too despite the futility. No one could see them. It was worth nothing. He once asked Gabriel, “Why waste the energy, if no one is watching?”

“You’re watching,” Gabriel had said. “You’re always watching.” It wasn’t an accusation, his starspeak had been soft soft soft. I dance for you he had been saying. When Sam understood, he said nothing. The next time Gabriel danced in daylight, though, he had joined in. He had shifted, first, a ripple. Gabriel hadn’t noticed. Then, as he shimmied, eyes downward, Gabriel beamed, glowing far too bright. It was his laughter, overtaking the sky. Sam hissed at him, told him to calm down. It was nothing but a dance.

“Oh, but it is a daylight dance and it is just for me,” Gabriel said, lilting.

“It’s not for you,” Sam rolled his eyes, but they both knew the truth. They danced together through the day, and only after, Gabriel agreed to tone his shine down. Sam didn’t need him falling. Not now when everything was new and light and magical-threaded. He would like to dance this one for awhile. He wanted to dance this forever, their daylight duet.

“You won’t lose me, Sammy,” Gabriel said.

“Remember The Lovers,” Sam said back. The two had loved, they had lost. There wasn’t another story in the sky that ended any other way. Gabriel shrugged and moved closer to Sam, sending Sam into a panic. They weren’t to move much. Could only shift enough in their boundaries to dance and stretch as the pleased. It would ruin everything in the sky, anyone using them to find a way home.

“Calm down,” Gabriel said. “I’m still here aren’t I?”

Sam realized he was still floating, still skybound. Had all the rumors been just that? He’d thought there was truth to them, but Gabriel was just grinning and sure and Sam wasn’t so sure anymore.

“I won’t let them take me, not either of us,” Gabriel said, confident and assured. He knew everything. Who was Sam to argue? There was nothing he could do but laugh and agree. They wouldn’t fall. Not like the others.

As Sam walked into town, he shook his head. Gabriel hadn’t fallen, but Sam sure had. Was it for the moving? For the daylight dance? Was it for the way his chest felt so full when he looked at Gabriel towards the end? Sam looked skyward and knew he’d never get to know. Not in sure terms. There weren’t any of those up there. Nor had he found many down here.

On the edge of town, he shook his head. That is where he’d find the people, if there were any in this town. He had yet to see a light, yet to hear anything but his own footsteps. Still, he softened them as best he could. Made them light and gentle. He did not dare disturb the universe, not when it could use the noise to stab him in the place his heart should be again.

He crept up to the first building, one of cracking and crumbling brick turned brown. Inside the windows, there were cobwebs and nothing but gray moonlight cast against old furniture left to rot. A sofa. A coffee table with one leg eaten away. Along the road, all the buildings were empty and echo-filled. Sam checked inside each and every one.

One, a home with a door that hung on rusted hinges that no longer fit, it creaked and creaked in the gentle wind. It was the only thing he could hear as he tiptoed along the road, making towards the center. There could be some people left, a few hiding in the heart of the town. They could be waiting for him to arrive, knives in hand.

When he got to where all the roads met and still he had seen nothing but his reflection in the windows full of moonlight and emptiness, he let himself walk heavier. Let himself weigh down the world. The center of the town there was a circle of a building with framed-brick walls of glass windows, crawling with vines that grew up and up and up. He peered inside and found wooden floors, moonlight streaking the brown with shimmering silver. Sam could see it, a dancer poised in darkness. He made his way through the doorway and his breath caught as he stepped inside. Above, there were chunks of domed brick, the ceiling missing, fallen onto the floor and scattered against the wood. He could see the stars, littering the sky. He could feel the walls, all of them keeping him safe. If he had thought of a perfect place short of the sky, this would be it.

For tonight, he shut the wooden framed door behind him on creaking hinges, and he made a bed with his spare clothes in the back corner where no one would see him if they peered through the smudged glass windows. This part, where the ceiling was still intact, was hidden from view. The sky above was fresh and alight, and beneath it he could dream again. Beneath it, he could heal.

He slept for days in that empty town, letting his skin heal in the absence of anything malicious. He had stars, he had silence. What could harm him here?

His skin began to knit back together, his shoulder not so sore any longer. When the hunger started to get too bad, he decided to sleep one more time and then venture out into the town he had claimed as his own.

By daylight, the town was worse for wear, but only on the outside. A fog hung over everything, sharp smelling and ever-present. Sam liked that it was there. Made him feel more hidden as he moved through it. He managed to find his way inside the boarded up supermarket down the street and found some of the shelves still full of packaged food. It looked fresh enough and he opened a jar of peanut butter, scooping a finger in without hesitation. Jody had told him peanut butter was one of those things, a thing that doesn’t die. She’d said it when he whispered Gabriel’s name that night beneath the stars, he knew she meant something beyond listing foods that don't die.

But, she meant this too and he ate it with fervor, his craving for food unending until the jar was half empty. He chugged down water from a jug in the back, stomach hurting with the sudden influx. He shrugged, grabbed a plastic basket partially melted from years of sun through the windowpane, and loaded it with food.

In the doorway, he paused. Would he sleep in the center of town, in the room of wood and window? Would he find another place to stay and keep that place for special days? He decided he’d sleep in the glass room for at least one more night, dedicating the next day to searching all the houses in this town for anywhere else he may want to sleep.

He took a few trips, food and water, grabbing everything he could. He found bandages in the supermarket, too. He tried to grab the clothing left behind, but it disintegrated when he touched it. It had been eaten at, it had wasted away. How long had this place been left? Where had all the people gone?

Sam shrugged it off, only knowing one thing of humans and that was their constant choice to change. They had lived here, they had left. Had there had to be a reason? Could they not have chosen to go off in search of a better place? Sam decided to think that so. He’d had the image of an empty town full of light, and here it was waiting for him. Some places were better suited to others, but this one was for him.

Back in his center room, he sank onto the floor exhausted from his day’s work. Unpacking the bandages and ointment he had found in the store, he patched up the wound on his chest, wondering if he’d find anything to sew the skin together so it would heal faster than it was. He couldn’t do anything for now, but try to sleep and let the night heal his skin and heart that ached so.

After a week of exploration, Sam had a pile of things, he’d found, stashed in the corner of the place he started calling a “studio” after finding the word, fading, on a sign in the back room. It was small, a bar hanging across the top between the two side walls, and not much else. It looked like it was a closet of some sort, a place to store whatever it was that went on inside this room with all the windows and wooden floors.

On one side, by daylight, the windows became mirrors and bars lined the wall, wooden and splintering after the years of rot and wear. Sam would have to sand them down, have to do some work to get the floor back into it's old shining glory that he could see in his head, too. He hadn't a clue how, but he knew he had nothing but time and time and time. He'd find out how.

Until he figured out how to restore the wood, he spent his days doing as much as his chest would allow. He found dental floss, which he used to stitch his wound closed. He’d done this while sat inside the cracked tiled bathroom of a house he'd passed before. The one with the door that was hanging open, like it was creaking to draw his attention.

Inside that house, there had been a couch, torn open and emptied. He had left footprints in his wake. The room had been empty, all the furniture stiff and dead. It made his heart hurt, his whole body chilled when he saw a shattered picture frame lying face down on the carpet.

Afterwards, Sam avoided the houses with the worn porches. Didn't go inside the apartment buildings despite their gaping doorways and ease of access. He went for the storefronts, the glass-windowed dead-neon convenient stores long abandoned. Never had people made a home inside of those. They did not feel like moving through a graveyard.

Inside one store, he found blankets all the colors of the rainbow. In another, tattered pillows hand-sewn and soft. In a third, propped up behind the counter, he found a picture of a smiling couple. He let it fall from his fingers and didn't return to that store for a few days. It hurt his heart too bad to see the smiles of people long gone. It made him feel the same when he looked at the sky as time passed and he still had no idea how to return.

After a week, the ache in his chest had dimmed to something more manageable. He swept the wood of the studio clean of debris, and he sat on the newly cleaned floor, eating something he had found on the shelves of a mini-mart on the outskirts of town. It was sweet, a bar of some sort of cookie covered in chocolate. It reminded him of Gabriel. Sam knew he'd love it if he ever had the chance to try.

He leaned back, food cast aside. "Gabriel," he whispered, peering through the cracked roof. "You'd love this."

Sam felt the tears spring. Talking to a star that probably wasn't listening. One he had loved. One he had lost. It all seemed pointless.

“Help me find my way home." There was only empty sky where Gabriel was supposed to be. He had been there the night before, flickering out the moment Sam had locked eyes with him. It broke his heart, it broke his soul. Gabriel didn't love him, at least he didn't think so. He'd have stayed, he'd have danced.

"I am a star," he whispered, "But it doesn't feel so true anymore."

But, this time, there was a flicker, and Sam was moving without knowing why. He moved his food out of the way, peeled his t-shirt from his body, kicked his shoes off to the side. In the center of the window-surrounded darkness in the town he found dead and deserted, Sam bowed his head, listening. Were the stars singing? Could he hear their lullaby all the way down here?   
It took a moment, head bowed, before the song found him. Was it the stars, was it the town? He didn't know, but he could hear it singing. He let it sink into his skin, echo around the room, flood his bones with something other than sorrow.

He let it start in his feet, pointing his toes as he swept them along the smoothness of the wood. Let it travel up his hips, his chest, bending his neck back towards the sky.

It was awkward first, unused to the limbs he found himself inside. It was stuttering and clumsy, skin dragging against the wood. But, then, something changed. He closed his eyes, stopped caring so much about what he looked like from the outside. There was no one looking anyhow.

Then, he was no longer body parts moving. No longer his foot moving then his arms. He was moving, flowing, his whole body light. He spun on his toes, kicking his other leg out to keep him spinning, arms outstretched, catching starlight in his heart. From there, all it was, was him and his sky, him and his song, him and his body and the way it felt more like his own than it ever had before.

Images of the ballet dancers on their stage flashed through his mind, but he knew he could not compare to their beauty, nor the way they found the movement of the ocean inside themselves. He did feel the way it looked like they felt, though, softened face and lost in the feeling of it. If they knew that was how starlight felt, would they ever stop trying to reach the sky?

Sam didn't think so.

There, beneath the stars, he danced until his limbs ached, leaping across the wood floor, soaring through his patch of sky. If he jumped and held his breath, it was like he was skybound again.   
  


He finished, and turned his eyes towards the sky. He hadn't wanted an audience, only wanted one pair of eyes. In Gabriel's spot, there was a light and Sam's heart leaped. He had seen him dancing for him, he had seen Sam's cry for help.

Sam blinked and he was still there. "This was for you, you know," Sam whispered. "I finally feel like a star again."

Gabriel glowed long enough for Sam to get used to the way the sky looked so much more beautiful with him in it. Then, he flickered out and Sam bit back a cry. He could only ask so much of Gabriel, all those miles away.

Sam fell asleep fast, fell asleep smiling and light. Gabriel had seen him. Gabriel had glowed. For him, Sam told himself. He had glowed for him.

He dreamed of the sky, but all the stars were swirling. He was one of them, free in his sky. At first, he was frozen, unsure of his freedom.

Across the sky, there was an explosion, two stars colliding. But, it wasn't destruction, they emerged together, linked and glowing brighter than they had apart. After that, Sam went searching for Gabriel amidst all the confusion of a sky full of freedom.

He spent hours in his dream searching, catching a flicker before Gabriel was gone again. He found him, in the end, and Gabriel found him too. Across the sky, stars whizzing between them, they raced towards each other, reaching for the union the other two had found. Sam woke up before they collided, woke up before he could see if it ended in fireworks, or in an explosion. No idea of how beautiful they'd be if they could ever glow together.

After seeing Gabriel, really seeing him, the houses didn't seem so empty. In the morning, Sam stood on the steps of the one closest to the studio, taking a breath in the daylight. The knob turned easy, the door swung open.

This time, he spent hours searching through the house, making trips to the studio when it got too much to carry. He found new clothes, so he didn’t have to keep wearing the same t-shirt and jeans day after day. He found comforters to lay atop, thicker than the sheet he’d been sleeping on against the ground. Inside one drawer, he found money tucked beneath a sock, and he pocketed it though he knew not what for. There was no one around selling anything. Still, it might do him well to have something stashed in case he ever had to leave this place. He would have to, eventually. Had to find a way skyward again lest he rot away on Earth.

In a spare bedroom, there was a bed small enough for him to carry alone. He managed it down the stairs, trying not to let it drag against the dirt and asphalt as he passed through the street. He thought about leaving it, sleeping in the house by night, but his heart felt hollow beneath a roof now he knew what it felt like to have the open sky hovering above his dreams.

The only other option was to bring the bed along with, and so he did. He set it up off to the side, pressed as snug against the back wall as he could get it. He could still see the stars through the roof there, and better yet, still had room if he wanted to dance again. Sam had loved it the previous night, but part of him was afraid. What if it had been a fluke, a one time thing. What if Gabriel was glowing for something  or someone else?

* * *

Sam stood at the center of town outside his newly claimed home, staring down the road that ran all the way from one end to the other. He looked skyward because, well, he was always looking skyward, and the clouds moved swiftly across the blue, the surging of a wizard’s cloak and rippling too.

On cloud-covered days, the sky looked so different on the other side. So much more freedom from above than below.

When the rain clouds came in, Sam and Gabe would race them. They’d go soaring, laughter-heavy, skimming the cloud tops in their haste. They were trying to outfly the surging clouds full of rain before they became lighter and dissipated.

See, cloudy days were free days. As free as they ever got up there in the sky. If the humans couldn’t see, what was the point in staying still? What was the point in waiting for human’s attention that wouldn’t come. Chuck let them have it, it was the least he could do. He had birthed them in flame, sent them falling in flame too. They could have a day of freedom. They could have a day of racing the rain.

Sam was always behind but, not for being slower. There hadn’t been a time Gabriel had beat Sam across the sky. But, Gabriel always pushed it. Always moved too close to the edge of the clouds where he could be seen elsewhere and misplaced. There were always eyes on the sky, especially on the shattered edges of the clouds.  

“Gabe, wait,” Sam would call, but Gabriel would just grin before darting over the edge. A dare. Gabriel hadn’t ever known how to be anything else.

“It’s for the rush,” Gabriel would say.

“It’s not worth it, if you’re lost,” Sam said. “None of this is.”

But, Gabriel was too far ahead, not listening. Sam sighed to himself and sailed along at Gabriel’s tail. He’d be there to see it all, the beauty of his run, the beauty of his fall. Sam knew he’d watch the entire thing and it would break him to pieces.

Now, looking skyward, Sam could see the clouds moving overhead. Could see where Gabriel would be pushing, peeking just too far in their freedom. When the clouds started moving past, Sam took off down the long road of town, pumping his legs, chest heaving. He was glad for the emptiness of his town, he didn’t have to watch where he was going. He tilted his head upwards, studying the edge of the clouds. He was searching for a flash, a bright spot amongst all the sharp blue and drowning gray.

He was passing the doctor’s office when he saw a glimpse, just where it ought to be. A flicker where there had only been things unfamiliar and strange before.

He surged forward, trying to get ahead. If Gabriel could see him, he’d stay long enough to say hello. He would. He was always pushing the limits. For the rush, for himself, for Sam. He was always pushing the limit, Sam knew he’d be pushing it. Especially with Sam on Earth. This would be his chance to say something, to guide Sam home. A hidden moment inside a sky of storm.

Sam was running out of road, running out of breath, running, running, running and the sky was only empty still. He hit a rock, sticking out too far from the edge of the asphalt, and went sprawling, elbows scraping something sharp and dirt covering his lips. He rolled onto his back, gasping for air, chest aching, and still there was only nothingness above.

This had been their chance, hadn’t it? Where was Gabriel, who pushed the limits further than this for something as simple as a rush? Was this, was Sam, not a limit he was willing to fall for? To even prod at?

Sam stared above as the clouds overtook him, sending the day into dark while blood from his elbow clumped in dirt. In the rain, his tears were undetectable. Didn’t matter. No one cared about his tears anyhow. A fallen star, who was nothing.

He trudged back to his glass-walled home and cleaned his elbows of dirt, sitting in the center of the wood. He stretched his legs, bending overtop them on each side. He had seen the ballerinas bend, knew he could not bend like that. He would try to reach that beauty, that mastery of body they seemed to have. This one still seemed so damn foreign, he didn’t know how to exist inside of it. He had been forever, uncontained. Now, what could he say but how small he felt?

That night he did not dance. What would be the reason for it?

Rain began to fall in the hole in his roof, seeping through the cracks in the walls. He did not wait for the rain to subside before he was moving through the town, gathering wood from the stores he had discovered with it piled high in the back room.

He chose a dark, gray color, and made as many trips as his weak legs could carry him through the water and mud. He did not start to tear down the old wood, not yet, but he kept the pile close to his bed and dry. For the floor, he decided to sand it down the next day, smooth it out. If it was softer, easier, maybe he could find himself in this body that was his. It seemed there was hardly a chance to get back to the sky any longer. No one would help him. Not even the one who used to refuse to bend the rules. Not even the one he thought he loved.

Before morning broke, before the clouds too, Sam was on his knees sanding the wood of the studio. The water had dried in the way it always does, lingering and then suddenly, gone.

It took a week to get it all to his liking, and when he finished, he opened the door and swept the dust out as best he could. The ceiling was open, it would wash away eventually.

It was daylight when he finished, and after sweeping, he stood in the center of the hole in the sky. He toed off his shoes, slipped the soft pink t-shirt off his back. The sun was warming through the windows, and there was no one watching to look at his body and judge how he moved it. Not even the stars for they were sleeping. The sky would not see him fumbling, failing. It had not cared about his fall.

He couldn’t resist the draw of the floor, now smoothed and warming beneath his feet.

He knelt, began on the floor, crouched and small. This is how I feel, he said. Look at me crumpled and broken and invisible in an ever-stretching sky. He slid one leg out, fast on the new wood. Swiveling his hips, his shoulders, leaning towards the floor, he showed the world that wasn’t watching just how it felt to fall.

Then he was growing larger. On the ground still, but arms outstretched, reaching for the open sky. This is how it feels to want an untouchable infinity.

He curled his arms in, standing from his knees, spinning. This is what it feels to know nothing of a world. No center point to focus on. No way to orient himself in a spinning world he’d never felt spin before.

Sam let his arms reach, let his legs find a balance, grow stronger. He learned to leap. He learned to spin without the world turning to mush. On his toe he went around and around and still the world was recognizable.

In the end, he shrunk back down, curled in. A weeping man. He knew this world, he longed for what he’d lost. There may have been a balance, but he was still broken with no way to find the pieces that shattered.

He fell asleep, exhausted. He fell asleep a weeping man, weeping, weeping, both stardust and tears.

* * *

It had been a week of dancing only in invisible times, a week of replacing the wooden frames around the windows, piece by piece. He was blundering, lucky not to have shattered a hole in the windows. But, he hadn’t. The frames were done and sealed.

On the clearest night in a long time, Sam moved his mattress to beneath the open part of the ceiling and stared up and up. He would not dance, wouldn’t try to get the attention of Gabriel. He had tried. He had failed that too.

Instead, he tried to look at the sky through human eyes. In wonder, in beauty. Things that are so far away often are. He wondered if the humans saw him now what they would say of his beauty. That his beauty was miniscule. That it was full of flaws the way things up close always were.

He knew of the stars that fell, the ones that burned, the ones that exploded. He had seen the flaws of the sky up close and yet, he wanted back still. Would anyone ever feel the same of him?

He glanced to where Gabriel would be, but looked away before he could register what he saw. Clearly not.

“I used to be one of you,” he said. Maybe I won’t be again, he thought. He would not say it aloud. Just in case it came true.

He was dozing, half-asleep, when a streak flashed across the sky. A star was falling, one he did not know on sight. Different constellation, too far for Sam to encounter. It was vibrant, sharp. The star that fell was strong, bright, prime.

Sam wondered what it was that sent him falling, remembered he didn’t know the cause for his own fall.

In the darkness, he was awake in an instant. Tracking where the star fell, the point it disappeared in the distance, he tried to memorize it best he could. With a pen he found in an abandoned car in the parking lot of the apartment complex, he sketched the horizon on his wrist marking with a ball of darkness where the star had faded into empty sky.

Before morning, he was lacing a pair of someone else’s hiking boots up his ankles, black jeans tucked into them. His midnight map was fading in his hurry, but he rubbed it for luck anyhow. He knew nothing of the world, but that he would have given anything for a brother to help him through this new world. He had found Jody, eventually, but he had found the sharp end of a knife too. With a brother, no matter how stumbling, the world may not have been so sinister.

His backpack was heavy, his heart in the dirt. Another had fallen, the heavens raining down. It would have been easier to know he was the only one to lose what he had. He could shoulder the weight alone, move on with a bent back. But now, the entire sky could fall. There was no telling why. He may never find out what he, they, had done to deserve all of this suffering.

The day turned to night, his town long behind him. He stayed on the outskirts, avoiding roads, avoiding the sky. It was too dangerous, in this foreign land, to look to the sky for any sign of Gabriel. If he saw him, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep his glow contained. There was no way to prevent it, his heart belonging to that star that paid him no mind. He’d give himself away, everything, for only a glimpse.

“How pathetic is that,” he muttered. “Willing to sacrifice everything for a star that won’t look my way.”

A car passed nearby, and he stepped behind a tree, the bark scratching his hand. There was a town, looming, but he did not have time to loop around it. It was too wide to make it before the star awoke. Too wide to make it before he was cast into the world alone. Sam didn’t know how long he’d been asleep after he’d fallen, but he knew it was long enough for the sky to shift. Sam remembered how much it took to look at the sky after he fell, finding it so very far away. It was a heartbreak, the worst of them. He’d done nothing to take part in the blame.

The heartbreak of stars was heartbreak of everything they were, every cell made up their soul. The humans were lucky, they could blame it on fist-sized piece. Here is where I touch, they said, here is where I feel, here is where my heart aches each day ever since you left. Sam didn’t have that. He felt, he hurt, there was no one spot to blame. He was heartbreak, unending.

On the edge of town, he pulled the collar of his jacket closer around his neck, tucked his jeans further into his boots. Made sure the laces were tied tight, clipped his backpack against his chest. This close, he could hear the rumble of the voices, sharp against his ears. It was panic inducing, it was painful. He’d never heard so many things at once.

He noticed a teenage girl sitting on the steps of her porch, blond hair drifting gently in the wind against her leather jacket. He had her face buried in her hands, until she looked up, let her head tilt all the way back. Sam watched her look up at the stars as they blinked awake. Tonight, it was all at once. He could still hear the star’s symphony, faintly, when he strained for it.

Her face flooded with wonder, a twitch of a smile before her mother was calling her inside. “Claire. Dinner.”

The smile fell, her eyes too. “I used to be a moment like that for someone like her,” Sam whispered, looking up for a moment too. “Now, I am invisible.”

Claire went inside without seeing Sam. He kept walking into town. He did listen to the symphony above, though, and it drowned out some of the extra noise. It made it bearable. He could pretend the stars were cheering him on. He did not look for Gabriel, did not look at the sky again. Could not handle another heartbreak tonight. Not after seeing what he used to be for the humans down here. What he wasn’t any longer.

He kept his head down, but night was falling fast and his legs were aching with each step. He needed to find a place to stay for the night, but everywhere he looked was sharp. The elbows of a man, curled up on a bench of metal. The words of the man he brushed shoulders with accidentally. The grin of the worker hovering in the doorway of a building marked motel. Sam could not stay in a place full of glass. It had taken so long to get the pieces out of his feet before. He kept walking despite the ache in his legs. He’d find somewhere softer to lay.

There was a girl, singing on the corner of the street as the light flashed a green arrow for the cars to follow. It hit her soft red hair and Sam was drawn in as she began to dance, headphones hanging from her ears. She had a bag strapped over her shoulder, pins flashing in the streetlight of all shapes and colors. He could not make them out, but he found himself longing to find a soft place to sit and discover all that she’d pinned on herself.

He stepped forward, out of the overhang of the building he’d been walking alongside, sleeve dragging against the brick as she began to dance harder, waving her arms over her head. She was not a ballerina, had no grace in her flailing arms. But, Sam was mesmerized by her face. She was no ballerina, but she loved her dancing the same. He could see it in her smile, the small kind that lived in her eyes despite them being closed. The kind that tugged at the corners of her mouth.

He stepped forward again, stopping behind her at the corner, waiting for the light to change. Across the street, the red hand turned into a walking man in white and Sam waited for her to move. She didn’t, lost in the dance. It hurt him to do it, made his chest ache, but he held out a finger and tapped her shoulder once. He was going for soft, but he thought it might have been too hard for the way she jumped the second he touched her shoulder.

“Sorry. I didn’t want you to miss it,” Sam said, pointing at the walk sign. She looked startled, born in the wrong world since she last opened her eyes. Sam knew that feeling. He, too, had opened his eyes to find the world rewritten.

“Whoops,” she said. “Got a little lost there.”

“Yeah,” Sam said with a grin, falling into step with her as they crossed the street. “I could see that.”

“I know, I know. It’s a little strange,” she said.

“Trust me, I have plenty of strange. I thought it was kind of beautiful.”

She turned to look up at him, eyes alight. “Really?”

“Really,” Sam said, stopping on the other side of the street. “May I ask you something?”

“Shoot big guy,” the woman said.

“What were you listening to?” Sam asked. He had heard the music of ballet, heard the music of stars. He had yet to hear the kind of music that lead to the dancing she had done. If he had to name it, it would be the music of joy.

“Here,” she said and on that street corner, she held out an earbud. She led him to the building on the corner and gestured for Sam to sit. They slid down to sit on the steps of a store long closed, shoulders brushing. She was soft, warm, Sam could feel it coming off of her. The way it didn’t seem so loud. The way she smiled at the world he could only see sadness inside.

The music began, upbeat and thudding in his ear. It took a minute to find where she had found the happiness, the joy. But, then it was there, thudding in his ear and the heart he called his body. The toe of his boot was tapping against the step without him realizing it, and he knew there was a beauty in this kind of dancing too.

At the end of the song, she turned to Sam and grinned. “My name’s Charlie.”

“Sam,” he offered, pulling the earbud from his ear and holding it out to her. She shook her head.

“Sam, how’d you like to have a sleepover tonight.” Sam didn’t ask if she’d seen his backpack stuffed with all he owned, if she’d noticed his wandering eyes, the lateness of the night.

“I’d love to,” Sam said as the stars looked on from their cold, cold places.

Charlie gestured for Sam to put his earbud back in. “Now, this one is one of my favorites.”

They walked together, earbud tethering them together, through the streets of a town much more alive than the one Sam had come from. It wasn’t grand, not like the ones he’d seen in the background of the TV shows Jody would leave on. But, it was bigger than he’d ever been inside and he was glad when Charlie took his hand and began to swing it between them. Sam grinned, twirling her in a circle while the earbuds they had in fell from their ears and they continued to dance down the sidewalk to music Sam could still feel yellowing his chest.

At a set of metal stairs near the opposite end of the town by the way the trees began to creep in again, Charlie led him up three flights, boots clanging all the way. She unlocked the door to a tiny living room full of figurines and knick knacks. Jody’s place had been empty, this one full to the brim, though he didn’t see a single picture frame lost amongst the clutter.

Charlie let him use her shower and he tried not to stand too long under the heat. This time, it didn’t feel like birth, wasn’t warm like he used to be. It was just hot, his skin on the verge of burning. He was left raw, disenchanted with even this. Was he to lose everything that made him feel like what he used to be? It seemed so, Sam thought. He shut off the water and let it drip off his skin.

Charlie put on a movie Sam had never heard of, something about the war of stars. It hurt his heart to think, but he found the movie to be both entertaining and hilariously inaccurate.

“It ever bother you to know the stars you see aren’t close to the truth?” Sam blurted, forgetting in his exhaustion to watch what he said. Keep the pieces of himself hidden even from Charlie who seemed to hide nothing of her own.

“I mean, I guess a little. But, we all see things a little skewed. How do you see them?” Charlie asked, turning from the screen to Sam on the couch beside her.

“A graveyard,” Sam said, careful not to meet her eyes.

“I think they’re beautiful,” Charlie said. “Full of light and dancing.”

“I used to think so too,” Sam said.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll see the beauty again. It always comes back.”

“I hope so,” Sam said. He didn’t feel like watching anymore, instead turning away from the window. It had been a bad idea to catch a glimpse of the sky. Would he ever find beauty in what he had lost? Would the stars ever be anything but a home he’d been cast out of?

In the morning, Charlie took Sam to a breakfast place with sticky plastic booths and pancake platters far too large for anyone to consume alone.

“Luckily, there are two of us,” Charlie said and ordered every flavor she could. The table was covered by the time the plates stopped coming and Sam didn’t know where to start. Charlie shrugged and grabbed a bite from the plate in front of her, moving with the other hand to a plate across the table. “Dig in.”

Sam followed suit, snagging a bite here or there, never lingering long. He was still eating long after Charlie called it quits, finding each bite new and exciting. He liked the strawberries on top of the plain ones. He thought about Gabriel when he tried the ones with candy baked into the batter and avoided those afterwards.

When they were done, Charlie pulled him into a hug, her head pressed against his chest before he remembered he had heartbeats everywhere. “It was great to meet you, Sam. Good luck, wherever you’re off on your adventure to.”

“I’m off to find the beauty in the stars again,” Sam said. “Thank you. For everything.”

Charlie saluted him with a grin and in opposite directions they went.


	4. Chapter 4

Sam was close and, though his legs were aching with his body, he kept walking. The sun dipped below the tree line, and that’s when he began to smell it. The scent of darkness, of infinity, rich and cold and hovering. He had been missing it, since he fell, the smell of space dust and stars.

His legs hurt no longer, they ceased to exist. There was someone from his home, waiting for him to arrive. He shrugged his backpack on his shoulder, shifting, and as the tree line thinned around the asphalt he’d been following, the smell grew stronger and stronger.

He let himself pause, just for a moment as the sky darkened above in a clear night of nothing but light. He stared up, willing his eyes to block out everything else. With the smell and the dark the trees added, it was almost like he was home again. Almost. The stars were too far, though, and he did not like to see them so small. It made him think about how they saw him, lost from them and miniscule.

He was a pinprick of nothingness down here.

Sam shook his head. He may have been nothing, but there was a star that needed some help. A brother. He could not leave him behind. Maybe together they’d find a way back home.

It was not much longer when the crater appeared in the distance, close enough to see the darkened soil it had sent sailing through the air. Close enough to see the trees that had been crushed and shattered and left to die. The stars were beautiful above, sure, but when they fell they left ugliness in their wake.

He hurried to the edge of the crater where the earth gave way, crouching when he found the center of the crater empty of anything but dirt. The sky was dark, it was his heart. There was one thing he was meant to do, and he had taken too long. The star would be lost, wandering through the woods, unknown in an unknown land.

Sam buried his face in his hands, sighing. This world was not like his last. He failed everything here and it just kept coming.

“Hey man,” a gruff whisper of a voice came from Sam’s left. “You okay there?”

Sam jerked up to find a man, cropped brown hair atop a star-freckled face, stark naked and sitting against one of the only trees this close to the crater still standing amidst the destruction. There was blood crusting above his eyebrow and Sam could see him wince when he shifted where he sat.

“I came to help you,” Sam said. “I thought you had wandered away.”

“Didn’t know where to go. Figured I’d stay and see what it looked like in the sun tomorrow. Find my bearings then,” the man said with a wincing shrug. “Who are you?”

Sam sank down where he was crouched, close enough to see the man, but far enough not to scare him away. He’d test the boundaries, but some other time. “I’m Sam. Samuelon. Used to be anyway.”

The man nodded, eyebrows raised. “Constellation two over from me. I’m Deanir. Dean, now, I guess.”

Sam nodded. He gestured to where Dean had his arm over his ribs. “Mind if I take a look? Brought some stuff that might help.”

“Guess so. If you were going to kill me you would have done it by now, right?”

“You’re smarter than I was when I woke up,” Sam said, pulling the neck of his t-shirt down so Dean could see the puckered skin where the knife had left its mark. “Wasn’t aware the humans were still hunting creatures.”

“They’re greedy, don’t much care for what.”

“Guess I’m one of them now,” Sam said as he knelt in front of Dean, lifting his elbow with gentle fingers. Beneath was an ocean of shades of purple and blue, no sign of flesh color on either side of his ribs. Sam pressed against each rib, noting winces on four different presses.

From his backpack he pulled out the medical supplies he’d wrangled, slings and splints and painkillers a plenty. Dean watched him pull everything out, a low whistle. “Looks like you were expecting much worse.”

Sam shrugged. “Yeah, well, I didn’t exactly come out the other side shining. You seem to be in better shape than I was. Just the ribs?”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “That’s the main of it. Few knicks here or there, but that’s it.”

“Good. We’ll get you patched up in no time.”

“Then what?” Dean asked.

Sam shrugged, pulling out bandages to wrap around Dean’s torso, having him lean forward as he wrapped his ribs up tight. They’d heal better this way, at least that’s what he’d heard. He hadn’t had much time to master medicine what with the figuring out the whole new world. “That’s kind of up to you. I found an empty town where I’ve been staying, but you don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I know a lady you can room with for a little while if you’d rather being in a city. Though, it’s quite a walk from here.”

Dean grunted and fell silent while Sam worked on his cuts and scrapes, making sure none of them needed stitches. Finding none too deep, Sam dug out a spare change of clothes and held them out. “We can stay here until morning, then you let me know.”

Dean nodded and stared at the clothes, wincing as he moved ever so slightly forward from the tree. Sam gestured to the t-shirt Dean was grabbing from the dirt. Dean sighed, but held it out. Sam slid it over Dean’s head, letting him lean against his chest while Sam helped him work his arms into the holes without jostling his ribs too badly. “Thanks,” Dean said. “That woulda been a bitch without you.”

Sam grinned, eyeing the pants before he picked those up too. Dean held onto Sam’s neck while he stood them both up, helping Dean step into the boxers and sweatpants he’d brought in case. “You’re gentle for a giant, aren’t you?” Dean muttered.

Sam snorted, letting Dean back down into the dirt easy. “Don’t think I’m so giant as you are a pipsqueak.”

“Once these ribs are healed, I’ll take you down,” Dean said, easy grin across his face.

Sam just shook his head as he spread out a comforter on the ground, using balled up t-shirts as a pillow for them each. They lay on their backs on the edge of Dean’s crater, clear sky stretching for miles while the smell of space swirled through the air. It was thick in Sam’s throat. A taste of what he’d lost. Cruel, cruel poison.

As he stared at the sky, Gabriel appeared, glowing bright in pulses. Sam’s heart leaped in his chest as Gabriel kept glowing even after he’d registered his presence, even after he began to stare.

“Dude,” Dean said, elbow in Sam’s side. “You’ve got to learn to keep that in check.”

“I know,” Sam said, looking away from Gabriel, his own glow fading as he did. But when he turned, he saw a gentle glow fading from beneath Dean’s skin too, but Dean wasn’t looking at the sky. His eyes were closed. He was wandering in places Sam didn’t know, loving something there too.

After a moment, Sam turned back to find Gabriel still there, but gentle. His normal glow. He’d seen Sam, though, helping Dean and he had thanked him the only way he could from so far away. Sam knew, he knew. Gabriel may not have loved him, but he had seen him. Had been watching. That was enough while they were so far apart. “I have to find a way back home.”

Dean shrugged at his side. “Is there a way? And is it even worth it? They cast us out after all. Last weeks garbage and all that”

“I don’t know. I don’t. But, this world is crazy and I am alone.”

Dean shrugged. “Maybe you don’t have to be so alone. Think I decided to come to that abandoned town with you, if that’s alright. At least ‘till my chest gets healed up.”

“Course it is,” Sam said. “It’s a two day’s walk, but I think I know a place we can stay on the way back.”

They slept until the sun came up and shared a box of granola bars between them. Dean chugged his first bottle of water, tieing the flannel Sam had given him around his jean-clad waist. He nodded, wincing when he twisted his torso to clap Sam on the shoulder. “Let’s go. Show me how this new body works. This world too, I suppose.”

Together they began to walk under the blank, light-flooded sky.

* * *

When Sam knocked on Charlie’s door, she opened it muttering about chinese food delivery being faster than she remembered. Sam grinned, hope plastered all over his face.

“Not Chinese,” he said.

“Definitely not,” Dean said at his back.

Charlie didn’t say anything, just held the door open and let them come in. “Think I might need to get more food. How do you feel about pizza?”

“Never had it,” Dean said.

“What?” Charlie screeched. She was dialing before their eardrums recovered from their shattering, ordering far too many pizzas for the three of them to eat. Sam sent Dean to shower, showing him how to make the water feel a little bit more like the home they’d lost. He whispered, so Charlie wouldn’t hear as he said the water would feel like space again. Dean snorted, but Sam could see him watching closely as he went over the dials again.

When he went back out to the living room, Charlie was already setting up for a movie night. Said she was pulling out ‘all the classics’. She met his eyes across the couch as he sank down into it, but she didn’t ask any questions.

Sam had to offer her some sort of explanation. “He’s in trouble. We both are. Kicked out of our home.”

“Say no more, you’re welcome to stay as long as you need to,” Charlie said. “But, seriously, no pizza?”

“He’s from somewhere far, far away. Me, too. Just been gone longer than he has is all.”

“Sam?” Dean called from the bathroom, voice soft. Sam smiled at Charlie, but hurried into the bedroom to find Dean struggling to wrap his ribs back up by himself. “Little help here?”

Sam could see the pattern of constellations all over Dean’s back in freckles he swore were glowing like Sam’s veins did. From the heat of the shower, most likely. Dean winced and the glow was gone. “My veins do that,” Sam muttered, meeting Dean’s eyes in the mirror as he began to wrap his torso up. “The glowing thing.”

“I saw,” Dean said. “Guess the stardust lingers in different places for us.”

Sam took his turn in the shower, not irritated in the slightest by the lack of hot water. How could he be annoyed  after seeing Dean’s small smile while they’d wrapped his ribs and got him into his clothes again. The semi-warm water was nothing for the knowledge he’d helped Dean feel a little more comfortable in his skin here. Well, it wasn’t nothing. But, it was worth it. The water had stopped being a comforting reminder as soon as it stopped feeling like home, but the echo of something he used to love.

When he went back out, he found Dean on the center of the couch, legs splayed, pizza dripping grease down his hand while he scarfed it down. As he passed, he smacked Charlie’s leg. “I missed his first bite.”

“It was practically orgasmic,” Charlie snickered. “You would’ve had to shower again.”

“Shut up,” Dean said through a mouthful of pizza. “Shit’s delicious.”

“What did I tell you?” Sam asked, scooping up a piece of pepperoni and biting in as he sat down next to Dean on the couch. Charlie started some movie on the screen and Sam studied Dean out of the corner of his eye. The gash above his forehead was still seeping blood and Sam thought he should probably stitch it up that night before they moved on. He had left it the night before thinking it would clot. Had thought perhaps the shower would help too. But, now he knew he needed to get the blood to stop. After they ate, Sam promised.

Dean was leaned back, feet up on the coffee table. Didn’t seem to bothered by the loss of his home nor the confusion of this world. Perhaps he’d been watching the humans much more closely than Sam had, perhaps he’d wanted to fall. He was better at coping, that was for sure.

When the movie finished, Charlie shut off the TV and looked to them both with a glint in her eye. “I’ve got something for you.”

Sam raised his eyebrows as she stood, rummaging around in her bedroom while Sam started to clean up the living room mess they’d made. Paper plates and water bottles Dean kept draining and tossing aside. She emerged with a little ipod in her hands, and she set down a computer next to it on the table in front of the couch. “So, Sam, I was thinking about the other day when you showed up and I thought I could give you a little something for coming back to see me again.”

“Charlie-” Sam began to protest. They’d invited themselves inside her home. She should have sent them packing.

“No way. You’re taking this, end of discussion,” she said, holding up her hand as she typed at the computer and brought up a database of songs. “Now, explore. Have fun. If you have any questions as to taste or suggestions, I’m your gal.”

“Thought you said it was the end of the discussion,” Dean muttered and Sam snickered behind his hand as Charlie smacked the side of his head. She left them in front of the computer to explore at their leisure, and started doing the dishes in the kitchen left over from ice cream sundaes she’d made for them all.

Dean sat with his arms crossed and Sam remembered he’d never used a computer before. Without a word, Sam started to use it slow, making his moves apparent and clear. He searched for his favorite song from Swan Lake, found the song Charlie had been listening to when he met her on the street. Soon, they were alternating, Dean turning towards guitar-heavy, heart-strings kind of soul-singers that sounded a bit like what Sam would thought it would sound if falling stars sang. Sam went for the ballet, the symphony of the heart, some of the upbeat stuff, too, that made the world a bit softer for a moment.

They both liked a song by Taylor Swift. Charlie laughed out loud from the kitchen as it began to play through the room. Dean rolled his eyes but Sam could see his foot tapping between them.

By the end of the night, they’d filled the ipod with playlists for the both of them, mostly with Charlie’s help. She’d hooked them up with an old phone too, one that only did emergency calls to a few people so they wouldn’t have to worry about making payments. She programmed her number in and told them to call her if there ever was any trouble. Sam assured her there wouldn’t be, but Dean took the phone from her hands without a word and slid it into his pocket. He seemed to understand this world much better than Sam ever thought he would. Sam was, after all, still trying to get back to the sky. Dean didn’t seem to worried about making the climb.

In his backpack, Sam took out the first aid kit while Charlie went into the bedroom to make a bed for the both of them. Sam knelt in front of Dean, apologized for the sting, and started to stitch his forehead as neat as he could. Dean hardly flinched.

“Do you want to go back?” Dean asked, eyes on the window in the kitchen now full of frost and stars.

Sam nodded. “I’m trying to.”

“Why?” Dean asked. “I saw the way you looked at it last night with hope still after everything. Why?”

Sam slid the needle through Dean’s skin and sighed. “There are things I miss. Things I have lost. I’m not sure I want to live without them.”

“But, you are. ‘Sides,” Dean said. “There’s a million stories of falling. Not one of a star coming back. Got to be a reason for that, don’t you think?”

Sam knew he was right, knew there had never been a time when someone fell and then came back. There was only ever a new star in their place, only ever an empty space filled with a stranger’s face. He finished stitching Dean’s forehead, and packed up his makeshift first aid kit. They went to bed soon after, Sam thinking all about how he’d been alive for thousands of years and every rule had been broken except this one. Once a star fell, it was fallen. There was no crawling back to the sky.

In the morning, they had breakfast at the pancake place again and while Dean was in the restroom Charlie grabbed Sam’s hand across the table. “Please, Sam, be safe. I don’t know much, but, be safe. The two of you? Something special.”

“We’ll try,” Sam said. “That’s all we can do now.”

“Promise you’ll call me if shit hits the fan?”

“I promise,” Sam said, squeezing her hand as Dean headed back to the table. They devoured a table and a half of pancakes, taking over a spare on behind them with empty plates.

Sam hugged Charlie when they were about to go their separate ways, Charlie half-jokingly offering to hotwire a car for them. It was a nice offer, the idea of wheels, but Sam didn’t want to risk losing the isolation he had found in his empty town with the thought of someone following their trail. They’d make it just fine. There was also the idea of learning how to drive beyond what Sam had seen on the TV screen. He’d have to see if Charlie had the time to show him the basics just in case.

They were about halfway through the town when Dean turned to look at Sam again, sun high in the sky and beaming. He seemed about to say something, looking through narrowed eyes at the trees around the road. But, he shut his mouth and kept on walking. Sam took his chance to ask what he knew Dean was trying to ask him.

“Do you know why?” Sam asked.

“Why what?” Dean asked, wiping his forehead with the back of his forearm. The trees seemed a lot thinner by daylight, letting all the heat inside to beat them down.

“Why you fell?”

Dean shook his head with a shrug. “Don’t know. Sometimes I think we just fall. There hasn’t got to be a reason.”

“Sure there does,” Sam said. “There is always a reason. Remember all those stories they told?”

“I think they were just that. Stories. Ever seen any proof of them being real?”

“Maybe. Just one,” Sam said.

“Oh yeah?” Dean asked, stopping for a sip of water beneath a tree raining brown leaves down. “How you figure that?”

“Me,” Sam said. “I fell.”

“And you think you know why?”

Sam nodded, but he didn’t say anything else. Dean didn’t ask, just screwed the lid back onto his water bottle and kept on walking, footsteps crunching in the dirt. Sam fell into step behind him, unsure of his certainty as to why he fell. If it had not been for loving too fiercely, what could have caused his destruction? Nothing in this world seemed so strong as that. But, Gabriel was hardly there and Sam was starting to wonder if it had been a one-sided love after all.

He had loved, he had fallen. That did not mean he had been loved back.

* * *

They were careful as they approached Sam’s found town, eyes all around, looking behind them with each and every step. They could not afford to lose this place, Sam knew that more than Dean. Still, Dean kept his eyes sharp. He knew the costs. Knew he couldn’t make it much longer without taking a break, ribs aching.

The fog was worse than Sam remembered, looking in on the buildings. It had been a cold night. Dean whistled, eyes wide at the stretch of the town he saw. “Wasn't expecting something this big. You said abandoned and I assumed it was a shack in the woods or something.”

“Wait until you see the heart of it.”

They went through town and Sam pointed out all the places he’d been inside, showing him into a few of the houses that were still livable. Dean’s eyes lingered on the place above what looked like an old mechanic’s shop for the metallic garage doors stretching to the roof. Sam clapped his shoulder and helped Dean up the stairs, showing him how to jimmy the rusting lock.

He’d only been inside once before, the place baren and under-furnished. But Dean was only in there for a second before he’d shrugged off his flannel and gone down the staircase inside to check out the cars left sitting in the garage.

Sam eventually had to drag Dean from the cars, out to the main street to show Dean which direction to walk if he needed anything at all, pointing out to where the grocery store was closest to him. Dean mhmmed but Sam knew his mind was back in that metal and rust.

“Go on then,” Sam said grinning. “I'll see you later.” He walked himself home, leaving Dean to explore this place as he liked. He didn't waste a moment after Sam turned his back before going back into the garage to pick at the cars that had been rusting and rotting for who-knows how long. Sam got to his glass house and sank to the smoothed wood, exhausted. It had been a journey, and he knew it was far from over. Now there were two of them, two to feed, two to fight for. But, there were also two of them to fight together and, despite their differing opinions on where they'd ended up in this wild world, Sam knew Dean would help him in any way he could.   
  
Sam sat beneath the scattered sky and wondered if he'd ever find his way back. No one had before, not once, not ever. Why would he think himself the exception? He was insignificant, miniscule. He could not be the one to defy. He had nothing in him to be the one to break the only rule that had held for millennia. Nothing but stale stardust that lost the smell of space.

He was a human, what did he have but the remnants of what he used to be, bitter and stale stardust left in his breakable, breakable bones? The sky seemed so far, he knew it must be so. He lifted a hand, his back against the wood. He reached out, the stars beneath his palm. Sam could see them hovering beneath his fingers. He tightened his hand into a fist, but there was only empty air when he opened his fingers to let the stardust sprinkle down. He could not touch what he had loved. All of him ached.

He’d ask Dean how he managed, for the way he glowed that night beside Sam he must have loved something. He seemed okay to lose it. Could it be possible to move on without a heart?

In the morning, Sam and Dean wandered around the town together, two eyes better than one in finding things that would serve use to them. Dean found tools scattered everywhere and started to tuck them into his belt for later, saying he needed them but not what for. Sam assumed he’d found a car he wanted to patch up by the way Dean’s eyes were gleaming despite the bags under his eyes when Sam knocked at his door that morning.

They picked out furniture from some of the other places for Dean’s home. His was lacking a couch in any form of use, a bedframe around the old mattress on the floor.

“We should probably clean those,” Sam said, staring at the mattress that had been sitting in that rotting town as long as it had been rotting, maybe longer. Dean shrugged and picked up one end, waiting for Sam to grab the other.

They carried it outside the outskirts to the river that ran on the edge of town and stripped their shirts from their skin to make things easier in the end. The water ran brown around it when they let it sink in. Sam gagged at the thought of his own, coated in wood dust and what it gathered from the open ceiling.

“Think you’d be up for doing mine too?” He asked Dean who was splashing around in the water, lunging for tiny fish that darted by. Dean looked up and grinned.

“Sure,” Dean said, letting his fingers trail across the surface. He had a soft grin. One Sam hadn't seen before. Tracing shapes in the water Sam couldn't follow, Dean looked like he'd found a small piece of home again.

“Does it remind you of someone?” Sam asked, meeting Dean’s eye. His smile fell, Dean’s eyes going downcast. All of the shapes fell away as he pulled his fingers from the water. Sam scrambled, wondering who Dean was thinking of drowning in that river.

“Saturn?” Sam said. “The way he’d float in the sky?”

“Oh,” Dean said, fake smile across his foreign face. “Right. Didn’t spend much time with him.”

“No? Not when he passed through?”

Dean shook his head. “Wasn’t one for socializing. ‘Specially not with the ones that would leave like that.”

“We left,” Sam said.

“I didn’t leave anyone behind,” Dean said.

Sam knew Dean didn't know. Not the whole story anyway. Knew he was probably talking about someone else. Heartbreak seeping from the remnants. He hid his flinch in the water, watched as Dean traced the movement of the little glittering fish.

He lunged, face twisted sharply, and came up, hand clutched around a fish glittering blue in the sunlight. He glanced up at Sam. “Any idea how to cook these things?”

Sam shook off the ache in his heart and grinned. “We’ll figure it out. But, after the mattresses. Both of them.”

Dean sighed. “Fine. Where should we keep him ‘till then?”

Sam dug a shallow puddle in the bank of the river with his hands in the soft mud, leaving a border around the hole so the fish couldn’t get out. Dean let it from his grasp gently, his smile becoming a grimace as it darted into the dark parts. In the shadows, it wasn't blue any longer. Didn't glitter. It became a shadow too.

Sam let Dean frown at the water, at whatever he saw there that Sam couldn't, for one more moment. Then he waded from the river. “Coming?” He asked. Dean nodded, one last glance, and followed Sam into the trees.

Dean whistled when they came within view of Sam’s studio, eyebrows high. “Sweet digs.”

“You should see the inside,” Sam said, grinning.

When he opened the door, Dean stopped in the doorway. Sam laughed.

“It’s even better at night.”

“I bet,” Dean said. “Might have to come around tonight.”

“You should,” Sam said.

They carried his mattress and left it in the running river water while they pounded at Dean’s with their fists. It was far heavier than they’d expected, full of water from the river, so they left it on a bed of rocks they made to dry in the sun, doing the same for Sam’s when the water wasn‘t so brown coming off of it. For the night, they’d sleep on the floor. The mattresses would hopefully be dry by morning.

They stood, feet buried in mud, as the sun went down.

Sam turned to watch the fish swim in his tiny sea, circling the borders. He knew what that felt like, knew it too well. He’d been scooped up by strong hands and tossed into a sea he knew nothing of. The fish was ahead, Sam had yet to find the borders of this one beyond the disconnect with the stars. He was watching as it circled. Watching as it leaped from its imprisoned sea, glittering and vibrant blue in the setting sunlight, and landed in the river again.

Dean cursed as he caught the movement out of the corner of his eye. He went running after it as it darted away, kicking up water.

Sam watched it swim, thinking about the leap of the fish and how he wanted to fight that hard to get back to where he’d come from. He was separate from his sea, he was swimming against borders. He had to believe he’d find out how to leap, had to think that if there was a way for that fish to fight then he could to.

Dean snorted when he came back dripping. He caught Sam’s eye and shook his head. “Has a fight like that ever left you with anything but bruises and blood?”

Sam thought about the fall, the fights he’d fought with the world since then. He thought of Gabriel. Began to nod.

‘“Oh yeah?” Dean asked. “What’s that?”

Sam trudged from the river, mud weighing down his feet and the hole in his chest. “A broken heart.”

“Sam?” Dean called from the river where he was wading back and forth through the current calf high. “The mattresses?”

“Later,” Sam said. “They need more time to dry.” He did not turn his back, just kept walking his way home with his shoes dangling from his fingers while the sound of Dean hustling to catch up rattled through the trees.

Really, though. Had a fight ever left him with anything but pain?

From what he knew of this wild world, it was not worth it to try again. Not with these human odds.

But, he knew the stars too and up there, everything was worth getting back to the sky. They were the blessed ones, the chosen few, tempting fate with their beauty and their weight. Sam had tempted, Sam had failed. Dean, too, it seemed.

When he got back, in his rolled up jeans and dirt-covered feet, he stood beneath the setting sun and bent his head back, arms raised. The moment swelled, begging to be shattered, brittle beneath his fingers. He paused one moment longer, giving the stars, Gabriel, a chance to awaken to see him. Then he started to dance.

This time, it was pleading, leaping, grand sweeping of arms and legs and body. He spun the world backwards and prayed he could dance himself into the past. Into what he was before. Weightless. Stunning.  Worthy of the sky.

He was turning back the clock. He was hoping for the stars again. Pleading, pleading, for the hope of hopes, for the promise of a way back.

He did not know how to ask with his words of whom it was that was listening if anyone at all. So he took the only way he knew he could try, his body and the way he moved it was one of the only ways the stars might hear his call. He knelt, arms open, chest heaving, when he was too tired to keep asking Chuck to turn back time. His throat was raw with begging his silent beg.

Too afraid. He was too afraid to open his eyes and find the night sky blank. Or, worse still, too afraid of it missing only one.

He opened his eyes, found stars awake and shining. All but one empty place where he knew Gabriel should be. It was strange, the blankness he was feeling. Not surprise, not pain. He was numb now, disappointment pounding the sharp edges of his hope into something smooth and harder to feel anymore.This fight, too, had left him heartbroken with no bruises to prove his pain.

“Whoa,” Dean said from the doorway. “I mean, whoa.”

Sam dropped his head from the sky, staring at his dirty footprints scattered and smeared across the wood floor. He did not know if Dean had seen it all, the pleading and the prayer. He did not know if he cared. He had asked the stars to watch after all, what was another pair of eyes from Earth? Useless, was all. But, so were the stars, none of them calling him home.

Sam shook his head and tears began to fall. “I can’t touch the stars anymore.”

Dean stepped closer. “Not sure we ever could. Against the rules, remember?”

He kicked off his boots at the door, and sank down onto the floor at Sam’s side. He stayed far enough not to touch him, leaning back on his palms to look up at the sky. “Maybe this place ain’t so bad. Freedom. That’s doesn’t sound so terrible.”

“Maybe,” Sam said, too aware of the empty spot in the sky where Gabriel was supposed to be, bordered on all sides by the hole in his ceiling.“Can I ask you something, though?”

“Let’s walk and talk, get you out from under these stars.”

“Dean,” Sam snorted. “Outside is under the stars.”

Dean shook his head, pointing at the hole above them. “This is different. Framed. More personal,” Dean said. “Come on. Mattress time, walking time.”

“Fine, though I don’t think they’ll be dry yet,” Sam said, and he pulled his boots on. He stretched his neck, his aching arms. “I’d kill for a hot shower.”

“I think I might know how to get that to happen,” Dean said. “Also, wheels. Working on wheels.”

“Wheels? Really?”

“You betcha,” Dean said, holding open the door. They walked side by side down the deserted and darkened town and Sam reveled in the blanket that fell over him in the dark. He was invisible, and he was supposed to be. It was a relief, the opposite of starlife. He could hide in the darkness he used to have to erase.

“So,” Dean said when they got to the river and made their way to the mattresses. “What did you want to ask me?”

“Nothing, I think you were too far to know.”

Dean shrugged. “Only a few over from you by what I gather. Who you want to know about?”

“Gabriel,” Sam said, and did not look Dean in the eye when he said it. It gave away too much, though he wasn’t sure he was any good at hiding it as his skin began to glow, fingertips illuminating against the dingy mattress. He found it damp, still.

Dean was silent for a moment before he spoke. Like the river it was gentle. Like the stars, his words hurt. “When I fell, he wasn’t doing so good. Fading, struggling to light up. Not good shit.”

“He’s going to fall,” Sam said.

“Because you did.”

Sam shook his head. “I don’t think that’s the reason. He would have let me know.”

“Maybe he’s trying,” Dean said. His voice was strange, too connected and thick to be distanced from what he was talking about. “Sometimes that’s the best we can do with what we got.”

They left the mattresses to dry overnight and Sam followed Dean into town. “Want to sleep at mine tonight?” Dean offered at the bottom of his stairs. Sam thought of the sky, thought of having to sleep beneath it when he felt so numb.

Sam hung his head and followed Dean into his apartment. He slept beside Dean, on the floor, covered in comforters stolen from other homes. He dreamt about the day Gabriel almost fell and cried into Dean’s pillow, while Dean stared at the ceiling lost in his own sky.


	5. Chapter 5

They day Sam almost fell, Gabriel had overslept, still out of light when line of darkness hit their constellation and they all were alight but him.

“Gabriel,” Sam hissed. He did not want to draw attention to them, but he needed Gabriel to wake up. He’d fall if they found him, fall if they noticed there was no light where there should be. It would not be instantaneous, but too many strikes and he’d fall. Sam knew Gabriel had strikes a plenty, pushing boundaries with each snark he tossed or piece of sky he lit where he should not. This would be the last straw.

It grew too late, it grew to dark. Sam grew desperate, grew brighter, grew the strength from his heart that he needed to light the sky for them both. If he glowed bright enough, no one would notice. If he covered it up, they’d be okay by daylight. It would work. It had to.

It started to burn after half an hour, became his birth all over again after another hour. It was excruciating, torture, the way he was burning himself to death.

But, he looked at Gabriel, sleeping away, and he would not let his light waver. Everything in him protested, but he could not lose the only part of the sky he loved. He would not make it if that happened.

Three quarters through the night, Sam could feel his core start to flicker. He’d fall, he was sure of it. The night was not yet over, he had too much time to fill. He prayed to make it to the end of the night, just to the end, and then he could fall and it would be okay. Gabriel would be safe.

“Sam?” Gabriel yelled, blinking awake far too deeply in the night. “What the hell are you doing?”

Sam could see him put the pieces together. He let himself dim since Gabriel was glowing now. Still, his core was aching and weak and even now he’d have trouble making it through the rest of the night. He closed his eyes, stopped moving at all which he’d been doing to generate energy.

“You idiot,” Gabriel hissed, glowing slightly brighter to cover the gap Sam’s dullness would leave. On Earth, they’d still just be dots in the sky. It was only the ones with telescopes they had to worry about. The ones like Poppy couldn’t ever waver. Too many magnified eyes. “You should have just let me fall.”

“Never,” Sam said. “I don’t ever want to lose you.”

Gabriel grumbled all the while, worried for Sam’s future. He could still fall, both of them could. Sometimes, this was all it took. One moment of dullness at exactly the wrong time. One shift of the wind.

Sam slept through the next day until Gabriel woke him up at the last moment he could. “It was worth it,” Sam said. “Every ache.”

Gabriel scoffed, but he did not mean it. Gabriel thought the same, Sam knew. Or, Sam thought he had.

* * *

When he woke up, Dean was gone, a clanging echoing down the street. Sam wiped his eyes and pulled himself from the pile of blankets, leaving behind the tear stained pillowcase of his memories from when he thought he had been in love.

In the garage, Dean was sticking out from beneath a car, music from Charlie’s ipod loud enough to seep into his bones and send them rattling. Sam slid onto the hood of another car, one far too rusted and battered to save, and laid back to let it overwhelm him. He’d spend the day feeling only this. He’d spend the day forgetting he was anything but feeling something.

* * *

When they stopped for lunch, Dean went up to his bathroom, vowing to have hot water running by the time the hour was over. He’d been tinkering the night before, unable to sleep. Sam wondered if that was a permanent, his side of the bed empty and long cold when Sam had awoken. Wondered if this body of Dean’s, clinging to the sky, begged him not to sleep in the darkness, ingrained in his stardust blood.

Dean said the town was run on some sort of propane system for hot water, the kind you only see in towns small like this. Sam didn’t understand a word of the technicalities. Didn’t care. Hot water would be nice to have though. Even if it was only Dean’s shower.

He asked Dean once how he learned so much about the world that Sam was so confused by. He shrugged, tinkering with the car beneath his hands. “I was always watching. Weren’t you?”

Sam shook his head. He had always been watching Gabriel.

The music was still blaring, and Sam took the echo-filled, high-ceilinged garage as a chance to have a little fun dancing. This was not for the stars, not for the beauty. He let his limbs be sharp, let his feet scuff and slam, rattle the world with ugly moves. Hip-hop met his makeshift ballet style and it was both angry and honest. No one was watching; Honest was the only thing it could be.

Dean rapped on the wall as he came down the stairs outside, peeking through the doorway to find Sam, chest heaving, standing in the middle of the garage. “You good?”

Sam nodded. “Just testing these limbs out. Be better if you got me hot water.”

Dean grinned, leaning further through the doorway. “I got some good news for you Sammy-boy.”

Sam beamed, racing Dean up the stairs to where the hot water waited. He had been cold for so long, lost for so long. He’d get the smallest piece back with this water. A moment to pretend again.

Dean showed Sam how to turn the water to hot before shutting the door behind him. Sam was already tossing his t-shirt onto the floor when the door clicked.

* * *

One week later, Dean called Sam into the garage. Sam stood in the doorway, watching as Dean slid behind the wheel and cranked the car (a black Chevy Impala according to Dean) to life. Sam climbed into the passenger seat and Dean spun them through the deserted fields on the outskirts of town, dodging trees while they laughed all the way. The sky was vibrant, the fog a little lighter. Sam was left wondering if that’s what freedom felt like. He hadn’t ever felt it before.

When he was done with his joy ride, Dean turned to Sam. “Let’s teach you how to drive this thing.”

“How’d you learn?”

“I watched so many teenagers learn to drive, I had the instructions memorized. It’s a little shaky still, but the basics should help if you ever need to drive it.”

That night, they both lay beneath Sam’s roof. Dean was humming something from the car’s radio under his breath, soft and sweet, and Sam stared up at the graveyard of memories. He almost turned away, almost turned to Dean and asked to go on a late night food run, or a late night run, anything to get away from the grief. As Sam’s head turned, a flash across the sky caught his eyes. Dean’s breath caught as he, too, watched the star fall.

Sam looked at Dean, and the sigh was apparent all over his face. He’d been working to get comfortable, he did not want to leave again.

“You don’t have to tag along,” Sam said.

“You don’t mind?” Dean asked. Dean had begun to bury roots. It was his right enough not to want to dig them up every time Chuck decided it was time to cast another star out.

The wheels sped things up this time. He found the star, curled in his crater, clutching his leg in his hands. When he spoke, he had a southern drawl and called himself Benny without Sam asking. There was a smile in his voice despite the grit of teeth and pain. Sam liked him already.

Sam had him sling an arm over his shoulders and they limped their way up the edge of the crater, ducking straight into the car. The crater was closer to a town this time, close enough to blast across their TV screens in a news coverage. The Impala picked up the broadcast on the radio. They called Benny a crater. Said the debris would be near the outskirts for any of those listeners so inclined to investigate. Sam was lucky to have had the wheels, the humans would be there by morning. Benny would have been dead in the daylight.

He lowered Benny into the backseat, using the bandages he packed to wrap a makeshift splint around his thigh where the bone was broken from the impact. Benny cursed beneath his breath as Sam helped him into some clothing, too.

“I’m sorry this is your introduction to this place,” Sam said, voice soft. He was trying to keep his fingers gentle as he pulled Benny forward, sliding the shirt over his head. Benny let out another curse word.

“Does it get any better?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“Yes,” Sam said. He’d finished, left food and water in the back for Benny to rummage through as his nausea faded. “I think it does.”

“Oh yeah?” Benny asked. “Tell me.”

Sam started the car, and he was scrambling for something solid to give. A reason to love this place he was trying so desperately to escape. He thought about dance, about hot water, about the freedom of the road. About pancakes and strangers on street corners who danced even if people were watching. Sam talked about it all while the sun began to rise and his town grew closer and closer.

“From far away,” Benny said. “It all looks like chaos.”

“It is. But, that’s part of the fun of it.”

“How you figure that?”

“In the sky, we had only one place. One thing to do. While there may be chaos, may be knives stuck into my chest, there is freedom here. I can dance at midnight every night and no one can stop me. I can drive this car from here to the ocean. There are so many roads to follow, in the sky there had only ever been one hole we could exist inside.”

Benny hissed as the wheels rattled over a pothole in the road. Sam winced, stuttering an apology. Benny shook him off. “That makes it better? All these roads?” he asked.

“I suppose it’s up to you,” Sam said. “But, I’m starting to think it’s worth something. Maybe not the whole sky, but we didn’t lose it all. We still get to see the beautiful parts when night falls. Now we aren’t trapped inside it anymore.”

“Huh,” Benny said. “Not what I was expecting. Thought there’d be more anger. More suffering down here. They made it seem like the worst of fates.”

Benny passed out for the rest of the trip. Dean helped Sam carry Benny from the car into the house closest to Sam’s place. The only one on the street that was one story for the sake of Benny’s leg. For the first week, Sam and Dean took turns sleeping on Benny’s floor to help him from the bathroom and back. Help him with pain. Soothe him when his nightmares caused a thrashing that would leave him exhausted and weeping the next day.

By daylight, even when he could hardly keep his eyes open, Benny was always smiling. Especially when Dean would bring the iPod and play soft songs while he drifted in and out of sleep.

Sam caught Dean singing, head back against the windowsill while Benny dozed on the mattress on the floor. He watched as a tear slid down Dean’s cheek, silent. Sam hadn’t seen him cry yet. He backed out of the room as silently as possible. Let Dean weep when he thought no one was looking, even as he sang his brother to sleep.

The day after, they finally figured out how to made a makeshift cast out of bandages from the old doctor’s office with cotton stuffed inside and wooden pieces sanded down for stability. It’d be difficult to walk, but it would set the bone as best they could manage.

Dean took the night shift, Benny long passed out after the cast-making of the day. Sam only had the energy to spin a few spins beneath the stars, Gabriel unblinking in the sky, before he collapsed into his bed. He had not danced since fetching Benny. Gabriel was not watching and it killed him to know it now. He had lost everything, all of the parts of the sky he loved. Where could he go now, when he’d been aiming for all the way up there?

“I used to be a star,” Sam muttered into his pillow. He was asleep before the sentence echoed against the glass, reaching for the sky in a last ditch effort at a prayer for what he used to be. It would not make a difference, his prayer. He’d been praying with his human heartbeat since he landed on this godforsaken land and nothing had changed but his knowledge of his permanence here. He used to be a star. Used to. Now, he didn’t know what he was.

* * *

“Help me push a car into the garage?” Dean asked.

“Why?” Sam asked. “Aren’t there some in the garage?”

“Benny wants wheels. Says he wants to explore ‘the roads’, whatever that means. Wants them when he gets his leg back in shape and none of the others are even close to running. This one seems okay, if a bit harsh on the eyes.”

“Should get the cast off in two weeks or so. I don’t think it broke all the way, just a fracture far as I can tell,” Sam said.

Dean shrugged. “Caught him trying to walk on it yesterday when I dozed off. I don’t think he much cares if it’s healed when the cast comes off. Better you take it off sooner than he cuts it off and runs without making sure he can walk first.”

“Guess so. Maybe we can get another week from him before he does. I think his leg needs it.”

“Maybe,” Dean said, smirking at Sam as they pushed. They gave the car another heave, Benny arranged in the front seat to steer with his leg stretched across into the passenger leg-space, straight out and stiff.

“Think he’ll make it?” Dean asked after a minute of just his breathing. “Starting to kind of like the guy after all.”

“He’s got to try. Sometimes, that’s all we can hope for,” Sam said. “That’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?”

“Guess so. We’ll have to get some stuff together for him. Don’t want him out there alone and unprotected,” Dean murmured. “You know more than me what’s waiting for us out there.”

“I’ll take care of that, you get these wheels turning. His leg won’t be able to hold up walking the whole way.”

“I can hear you fools you know,” Benny called out the window.

“Just drive you southern-mouthed son of a bitch,” Dean called, snorting as the car veered into a pothole and jarred them all.

“I’ll be fine, thanks for worrying about me princesses. I’ll even send you a postcard with a kiss brotha.”

“That’d be great, then you can actually kiss my ass,” Dean called back. Sam bit back his snicker as Benny tossed his middle finger back at Dean. It wasn’t just Dean that had been watching the Earth closer than Sam.

Benny steered the car into the open door of the garage and they helped him sit on the bench off to the side. Sam slid onto the hood of the car nearest him and they watched Dean get to work while the music rattled even the stars above.

“So leaving, huh?” Sam asked.

Benny shrugged, shifting his leg on the bench with his hands and a grunt. “You told me about the roads. Can’t get them out of my head.”

Sam nodded. That was fair enough. Had he been free to roam the sky, there wouldn’t have been an inch of space he hadn’t touched. “Can I show you something before you go?”

* * *

“Little close here, brother,” Benny said, inches from Sam where they’d pushed his mattress into the center of the studio, the stars directly overhead. Sam rolled his eyes and pointed up.

“Let me show you how to use them as a guide,” Sam said. “Dean, you too, if you ever want to take off this could be useful.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Dean said, but he crammed himself on Sam’s other side and watched with wide eyes as Sam began to point out the keystones of the sky from the ground. It had been different above, a popularity contest. But they were down here and it was all practicality and human names. He showed them the north star, told them to use it to orient themselves in the area. Taught them about the way stars shifted, how they could use them to get a read of the season, of the month, of the time of the night.

“I used to live there,” Benny said, pointing near Polaris and the north.

“Used to,” Dean said.

“We all used to live somewhere, be something else. Now, this is all we are. Just human,” Benny said.

“But, humans are the best of them,” Dean said and it caught Sam off guard. He turned his head, finding Dean staring not towards the sky but out the windows into the town and beyond where the trees bloomed.

“Didn’t you see the wars? The famine? The murder?” Sam asked. Benny on his other side turned his head to see Dean’s answer too.

Dean shrugged. “We all see the pieces we want. I saw the man, struggling to survive after losing everything and letting a fish slip from his hands. Saw him heal a girl with the touch of his finger. Saw him pluck a rose from a bush outside a woman’s house and offer it to her even while it made him bleed.”

“You saw the beauty,” Sam said. “Guess I missed that part.”

“Depends on where you’re looking,” Dean said.

“I was never looking there,” Benny chimed in. “Wish I had been.”

“Me, too. I wouldn’t be so terrified of being left here if I had.”

Dean sat up, feet hitting the wood with a soft thud. “Still terrified, but of something else.”

“What’s that?” Benny asked.

“Not being able to find what I had found so beautiful now this world is so much bigger.”

“Thought you weren’t leaving?” Sam asked, voice a little too hollow for his liking. He had found these people he was beginning to like. Now, he’d lose them both.

“Don’t worry, Sammy, I’m not leaving just yet. Wouldn’t want to miss your cooking, or those moves you busted out in the garage the other day.”

“Moves?” Benny asked. “Tall boy like to dance?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “I don’t know anything about dance.”

“He’s good,” Dean said. He grinned as he bent down, grabbing the edge of the mattress Benny was laid out on. “Benny, hold on.”

Dean slid the mattress to the side with Benny on top grinning, and then he turned, hands on his hips. He nodded to the center of the room now clear. “Show him.”

Sam shook his head. “I have nothing to dance for anymore.”

“Do it for you. For Gabriel. For what the hell ever. Just...show him. Before he’s gone and he can’t ever see what you can do. What you love.”

Sam stood in the center of the stars, uncertain. He’d been dancing for them, but he had no idea how to dance now he knew he’d never get back.

Then, Benny’s voice was drifting, echoing rich and low, through the glass walls and Sam let it flood him. Let the beauty of it, of the way Dean tapped out a rhythm with his boots on the wood, turn the stars into glitter in the sky and nothing more.

He danced heavy, let his feet rattle the Earth. He was here, now, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Might as well let it know he was there to stay. Plant roots. Grow a little larger, darling. If he’d done this as a star, if he’d grown from the inside like the swelling he could feel in his chest, he would have exploded, would have been cast down. They were never allowed the luxury of expanding.

Here, though, here he could grow from the inside, he could consume and consume. He could eat the world whole, one swallow, and still be craving for there was more he wanted to do in his lifetime of lifetimes than leave it empty in his wake. He’d create something new, a smile on a face, a town from only ruin.

Nothing here could stop him.

No one was trying to.

When he finished, Benny was speechless and Dean grinning from ear to ear. Sam could feel himself glowing, and stared at his hands in the reflection of the glass. He was happy and for the first time since he’d fallen, it wasn’t for Gabriel alone. It was for himself.

That fact just made him glow all the more bright. He turned to find Benny and Dean both letting out a little bit of light. Dean from his stardust freckles, Benny from the way his eyes shined a little brighter than the rest of them, gray and swirling. They lit up their glass world from the inside, a beacon of hope in their dead town.

No one was watching. Except, maybe, one.

Gabriel above saw the glow, saw the way Sam looked not once at him through it all. The way he was glowing more than ever without Gabriel on his mind. Gabriel flickered out just a little bit more.

No one was watching from the Earth. Except, maybe, one.

The man with the scar on his thumb left from rose thorns felt the glow more than he saw it, for he was still too far away for that. He shrugged his bag further onto his coat-clad shoulders, and he kept his head down as he walked, pulling his sleeves over his hands as the idea of where he was going threatened to reveal the glow of his own veins, full of stardust and nebulas.

* * *

Benny taught Sam how to cook fish overnight in a stew, taught him how to rig the river up with nets so they never run out of meat. He whistled while he gut a fish and Sam stood to the side, queasy the first time.

“What’s the matter?” Benny asked.

Sam shrugged. “Feels a bit too much like what they tried to do to me.”

Benny’s fiddling hands stilled when Sam said that. Watched as Sam pulled his t-shirt over his head to swim in the river beneath the heat. Benny’s eyes lingered on the puckering pink scar over Sam’s empty chest as the fish in his hands bled onto the dirt at his feet. Sam dove beneath the water.

hen he came up, Benny was digging in the dirt a little ways into the trees, unbalanced and hobbling. Sam almost called out to see if he needed help, but Benny’s back was turned and he’d wandered far enough for Sam to get the message. Didn’t stop him from watching as Benny dug the fish a shallow grave and hummed a farewell funeral tune for it.

He wandered off in the direction of town, his leg still casted and crooked, but strong enough to get him around with a walking stick or two. Dean had come back with an armful of them after disappearing one night, setting them near Benny’s door. He said nothing, just left them for Benny to find and choose.

Sam asked him why he didn’t say anything, though all of them knew it was him. He had bark clinging to the hem of his jeans for days afterwards. Dean shrugged. “Not everything needs saying.” Like goodbye.

Sam knew. He couldn’t see the sky as anything but separate from himself anymore. The ache in his chest was eating him alive, a pressure too heavy to breathe past in the dead of night with the stars overhead. He said nothing of it, though. All of them had things they wouldn’t say.

That night, he tossed in his bed before slipping from beneath the sheets. He stood in the doorway for a moment, peering through the glass. All he saw were stars, reflecting around his darkened silhouette. He lifted his hand, against the star-speckled glass, but it was cold and stiff. He sighed, padding to the door in his bare feet. He did not hesitate, did not look back. When he got to Dean’s door, Sam only had to knock once before the door swung open. Dean let Sam inside without a question, wiping sleep from his tired eyes.

Sometimes things didn’t need saying.

Sam slept beside Dean, his back to the window. He slept easy in the dark when he pretended what he had lost did not exist anymore. Never existed in the first place.

Outside, the sky was altering, shifting into something new, flat, untouchable. This was what it was to see the sky like a human who had only ever been arth-stuck. This was what it was to know the sky no longer.

After a week, Sam slept in Dean’s place more often than his own, dancing only every once in awhile and hardly looking at the sky. Self-preservation. His heart would not break so often if he kept his eyes where he belonged.

Benny came to Sam’s door as he was sat sewing stitches into old clothing he had found in Benny and Dean’s sizes. Jeans and jackets for the cold season, piles and piles of them. Couldn’t find much that would cover his own ankles, but he’d get to that when the weather actually started getting colder. For now he could wear his high-water jeans and oversized sweatpants and be just fine.

Benny in the doorway was standing tall, no walking stick in sight, and his face was solemn in the frame of the sun.

“What’s up?” Sam asked, heart sinking. Something had happened, but what in this dead town?

“Brotha,” Benny said, “I think my time is nearing an end here. I was wonderin’ since you’ve seen more of this world than I have, is there anything I need to know?” Benny’s eyes glanced at the place on Sam’s chest where Sam could still feel the handle of the knife. Sam set down his sloppy attempts at sewing.

“Yes,” Sam said. He showed Benny where to hide a knife so no one would see it. Showed him how to cover his limbs so he did not shine. Told him not to approach strangers unless they were the kind of people that danced at stoplights on the corner of the street.

Benny gave him a funny look, Sam only shrugged. “Look, the world out there is vast, and I have seen little of it. But, I met the dangers first. It’s hard to get past that. You need to be careful, but also you need to find a little love out there in anything you can. Try heading south, I think you’d like that kind of life far as I can tell.”

He’d seen only Discovery channel and primetime movies from Jody’s television, but he got the feeling Benny would find some people there that would not care if he glowed a little every now and again. Find a stove to whistle over a little nicer than the ones they had here.

That night, Sam stitched up Benny’s pile until his fingers ached and helped him pack a duffel bag of everything he might need in his travels. They loaded the trunk of that old car Dean had patched up with food and supplies, shoving boxes in until Benny was laughing his drawling laugh at their frustration at not getting everything to fit.

“Boys,” he called from the driver’s seat, legs dangling from the open door. “You can’t pack the world.”

“No,” Dean said. “But you can pack fucking granola bars and water.”

“Apparently,” Sam cut in, “we can’t even pack that.”

Dean looked at the boxes half hanging from the trunk and began to laugh, hands on his knees. Sam joined in, Benny already laughing at the spectacle they had made. “We can’t even pack that,” Dean muttered as his laughter died into giggles. “Not even a box of granola bars.”

“Just give me the damn box of granola bars. I’ll keep ‘em up here if it’ll make you feel better about my leaving.”

Dean brought them to Benny and the laughter was gone. While they’d been packing, there had been too many things to do to think about why they were packing. Now, there was nothing left to do but say goodbye.

“Stay safe,” Dean said. “Don’t hook up with anyone who says their name is one of ours.”

“Sign of a stripper,” Benny said, laughing. “I know.”

He stood up on his weakened leg and pulled Dean into a hug, clapping his back with a strong hand. “Thank you.”

Sam’s turn was next and he didn’t know what to say so he just hugged Benny tight and let him go. Sam and Dean stood together in the middle of the road as Benny revved the engine and took off towards the south, car full of stolen things from a dead town in this wild world.

“Can I sleep at your place tonight?” Dean asked. Sam nodded and led the way, knowing Dean needed a reminder of what was familiar because it seemed like everything they loved wanted to leave them. This wouldn’t fix his heart, but it might help to look up and see a sky he knew once had loved him. Look up and pretend he was still there.

That’s what Sam did at least. He did not look away long enough to see if Dean was doing the same. He fell asleep, eyes burned with the image of the shifting stars. He wondered why he ever looked away.

The heartbreak in the morning, after dreaming of stars, was more than an explanation. Dean was absent the next day and Sam asked nothing of him when he was there again the morning after. He was distancing himself, preparing for Sam to leave too. There was nothing Sam could do but keep being there every time Dean needed to check.


	6. Chapter 6

It was a week passed when Dean was knocking at Sam’s glass door, outlined in darkness, backpack on his back. Sam’s heart dropped, sitting on the edge of his bed, legs going numb with fear.

“Sammy?” Dean said, opening the door. Sam braced himself, steeling his spine with a smile. He had lost the sky, what was another heartbreak?

“Yeah?” Sam called, turning his head from the floor where his invisible heart lay ready to shatter.

“I packed as soon as I could, figured it wouldn’t make sense to hang around for long,” Dean said, shifting the strap on his shoulder. “Take off before the sun wakes everyone up, right?”

Sam nodded, he understood. Nothing in this world was meant to last. Not even the stars. “Alright. You need anything?”

“No, no, I think I found everything I need. Came to see if you needed anything? I’m driving, by the way.”

“No, I’m good.” He would be. A lie now didn’t mean it would be a lie in the future.

Gabriel had said, “I will not let them take us from the sky.” Had said so many things that had been true then, but the nature of them had changed since. Couldn’t that be true of lies too?

Sam heard the door close behind him and he let his smile fall to where his heart lay shattered beneath Dean’s boot. He had thought he found a brother in this world, two of them. Now his empty town was empty again and the sky too. Would he find nowhere to be anything but alone?

“Uh, Sam?” Dean’s voice came from too close, his hand resting on Sam’s shoulder a second later. Sam didn’t look up, wouldn’t look up. To see his brother leaving beneath a sky that had left him behind would kill any hope he had of moving on.

“Oh, I didn’t peg you for the goodbye type,” Sam whispered.

“Goodbye? The hell you talking about Sammy, this ain’t a goodbye. We’ll be back.” Sam thought of the way Dean had taken to calling the car he patched up “Baby” and rolled his eyes. He sighed and pulled Dean into a hug, still sitting on the bed.

Dean’s arms gingerly wrapped around Sam too, awkwardly bent over to match his height. Sam hugged him close, hugged him fierce, didn’t let go. If he’d been given the chance to hold onto the sky, he would not have loosened one bit. But, Dean was not the sky. He had to let him go.

“Sammy?” Dean said through muffled fabric. Sam couldn’t find it in himself to let go. He was an abandoned man clinging to the only life around. The streets were dead, the forest stiff and unforgiving, a graveyard of wood and green. “Hey, Sam, I’m dying here.”

“Sorry,” Sam muttered, letting Dean slip from his fingers. Sam closed his eyes and watched him blink out like a star behind his eyelids, another added to the list. Would there be any stars left when he opened his eyes?

“So, what’s all this about?” Dean asked.

“Are you kidding?” Sam asked, snapping his head up. Who was Dean to ask his heart why it was breaking?

Dean shrugged and Sam couldn’t hold his tongue. “You’re leaving, Dean. Don’t you get it? I lost the stars, and Benny, and Gabriel for fuck’s sake, even after he used to promise we’d never let them take us from the sky. Time and time again. Now, here we are and I can hardly look at the stars for the way it makes my chest feel so hollow and heavy. And now? Now I’m losing you too.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Dean said, hands up as he took a step back from Sam’s anger. “Who said I was leaving you behind?”

“What are you talking about? You show up at my door, backpack on your back talking about hitting the road, Dean. I got the message loud and clear.”

“What? No, Sam, no. A star fell. I came to tell you I was coming along with this time to fetch them. The car’s all packed out front,” Dean said. He sank onto the bed beside Sam. “You really thought I’d just up and leave you? Didn’t you see the star fall?” Dean asked. Sam was struck silent. He hadn’t been looking at the sky. Hadn’t really all week. What was the point any longer, if the one he was looking for wasn’t looking back?

Sam shook his head. “Like I said, I can hardly look at the sky anymore.”

Dean slung an arm around Sam’s fragile shoulders and squeezed tight for a moment. “Shame. It’s a mighty beautiful sight this time of night. Never did see the draw of the stars until I got down here.”

“I’m starting to think the same thing about the whole human business.”

Dean snorted and let his arm fall. He nudged Sam and Sam, wiping his tired tired eyes with his palms, nudged back with his shoulder. “Well?” Dean asked.

“Well what?”

“You ready to get moving? I’ve got coffee in the car.”

“Oh yeah, just give me five minutes,” Sam said, scrambling to get supplies and his shoes.

“Hurry it up. There’s a star waiting for some help.”

“Yeah, yeah, just start the car old man,” Sam said. Dean flipped him off as he left Sam’s room and his laughter was the only thing still echoing when Sam followed Dean, boots kicking up dirt.

Dean had the back of the car set up with blankets and pillows stolen from houses left behind and Sam smiled but didn’t comment at the way he’d tucked the blankets into the cracks in the seats. He would have protested Sam’s comment about the kindness in it anyhow.

They had given Benny the ipod for his travels since the car he drove away in had no working radio inside, but Dean’s radio was immaculate and he cranked up the rock music he found on a station Sam hadn’t heard of before. Sam tossed his backpack of medical supplies and gallons of water into the back of the car and turned to Dean who was grinning into the night out the finger-printed windshield. Sam wondered who had looked through it before and why they’d left this sheltered view of the world behind. “Did you watch where it fell?” Sam asked.

Dean grinned and peeled out from the street in front of the garage. In this world, Sam had found joy marching through the little things. Charlie’s dance in the middle of the street, Benny’s lullaby-whiskey voice, the thumping of Dean’s hands against the steering wheel. The joy in these people swelled out of them, it made Sam warm from the inside. The birth of a star, but gentler so. Stars were shiney, sure, but humans had happiness he never knew in the sky.

Now, sitting in the passenger seat watching the trees whiz by while Dean tapped along to the beat of a song that spoke to his heart long after the ones who sang it were dead, Sam was certain that if he knew the humans had this, this lightness in his chest he’d never felt before, he’d have traded his space in the sky in an instant. From above, he had only see the suffering, heard the wailing and the prayers. It was not true, what they said. It was not hope that floated, but sadness, all the way to the stars. Hope was here on the ground, everywhere he could see.

Sam listened to Dean drum along to the beat and he smiled out the window at the stars once more, knowing what he had found of the humans was better by far than what he would have found in the sky save one. Gabriel was up there, but Sam wasn’t sure he’d ever really found him. The Gabriel he knew loved him, but now he was nowhere to be found.

The road was a better lullaby than the stars had ever been. Sam was asleep within the hour.

They stopped at a gas station with only one pump and Sam tucked his hands inside his sleeves as he and Dean moved through the store to get snacks and to pay. They had only the cash they had found tucked into couch cushions and stashed in desk drawers, but it was enough to get them through.

Dean cracked a joke as he reached into the cooler and Sam bit back his laugh, turning to face forward, as the bell jingled from the front. Dean’s own laughter fell, freckles dimming to nothing, as the couple that came in through the doors eyed them, brushing past to the soda fountain. They may be human, Sam and Dean, but the humans would never let them be. Not if they glowed like gold.

They got back in the car as the gas tank filled and both of them were silent, heads down. It was one thing to be on the road, invisible and zooming. Freedom. It was another to be vulnerable to everyone around them. Stagnant.

There was something about this that made Sam itch all the more to dance. Darkness overtop the plastic awning above the gas-station pump gleaming metal in the moon, concrete beneath his beaten boots. If there was no one around, he would get out and listen to the world’s whispering. If no one was around, he’d dance for nothing but himself.

But, there were people always passing through and he could not let himself dance. His joy was of Charlie’s and he couldn’t afford the attention she chose to ignore. What he would give to lose the parts of his blood that glowed stardust and galaxy glitter. What he would give to blend in here as he’d never been able to before.

They hit the road, Dean hitting the gas pedal hard enough for the tires to squeal and Sam not saying a word about it. They were farther than he’d ever been from his chosen tiny town and it made him itch to get back before the ones that left realized their mistake and came back. He could picture it now, the town alight from the inside, everyone in their homes again, chattering in the night. Could see them tossing his things out into the street, could see them shattering his windows and patching up his sky.

The star fell close, they’d be there just after daylight. That’s what Dean promised anyhow. As if he knew anymore than Sam did about where it was that stars fell.

“How do you find them once you think you’re close?” Dean asked.

“Roll down your window,” Sam said.

“Huh?” Dean frowned, glaring at Sam from the driver’s seat.

“Just do it. You’ll see.”

Grumbling, Dean rolled down the windows and the highway blurred into streaking lights. If Sam squinted, it was like all the stars were swirling around them, a dance close enough to touch. He let his hand drift out the window and pretended he was dancing too, eyes half closed the whole way.

When Sam began to catch hints of space seeping through the windows, he watched Dean out of the corner of his eye, waiting for his reaction. Dean’s shoulders stiffened. He pulled off the highway, turning onto a smaller road paved but mostly forgotten.

“Smells like the death of a star,” Dean said.

“Home sweet home,” Sam said. Dean snorted at his side and pulled off a sideroad when the smell became overwhelming and closing his eyes turned into swimming in what he was trying to forget. Sam slid his boots on. Dean was already out of the car, grabbing supplies from the trunk.

They walked awhile through leaf-fallen dirt, backpacks shifting on their backs. There were still houses around, still the occasional footfall where there should have been none. Sam thought there were rules about where Chuck forced them to fall, but this was pushing the borders of what he understood about the graveyard of stars the sky built. Weren’t they supposed to be given a fighting chance? Weren’t they supposed to be allowed to cool and grieve alone?

Dean’s breath caught just beyond the last house along a lane of dirt and Sam stopped in his tracks.

The crater was only half-formed, the other half in the middle of a river still flowing. There were spots of red inside the crater, bare footprints in the hole flooding with water. But, there was nothing of a star in sight. Not against the tree-trunks, not in the river.

“What do we do?” Dean asked.

“We look harder,” Sam said. “They can’t have gotten far.”

That was when he spotted the blood just beneath his boot. He bent down, level with the ground, to see if the star had come from behind them, or had gone that way in search of help.

“Dean, you see any blood?” Sam asked. Dean wheezed in return and Sam frowned, looking up.

He found Dean easy, standing where he had been. But, he also found a man with an arm tight around Dean’s neck, sneer spread across his bony face. Found, too, the glint of a knife large enough to go through his neck in one clean sweep.

He glanced back towards where they had come, but the guy tisked his yellow teeth. “Don’t want to leave me here with your little friend, do you?”

“Who you calling little?” Dean rasped from the hold around his windpipe. The man punched at his kidneys in response and Sam could tell one of the blows landed where it was aimed by the way Dean’s face went pale and splotchy.

“Okay,” Sam said, crouching with his hands outstretched, remembering all the while he had a knife tucked into his boot. He just needed to get it, then they’d have a fighting chance. “Okay.”

“Alrighty boys, you’re coming with me. It’s a good thing my place has three bathtubs,” the man cackled.

“Surprised you’ve got running water by the smell,” Dean snickered. The man caught Dean with the knife this time, cheekbone spilling blood. Sam reached for the knife in his sock but found it empty. He had forgotten it in his heartbreak and hurry when they left. He stood up before the man could do anymore harm, Dean’s face gushing blood down his neck, starting to spread against the fabric of his t-shirt.

“Walk,” the man said. Sam walked slow, careful, stepping around logs and rocks. Keeping the trail they took as smooth as possible so the worst did not happen, so the knife would not jar against Dean’s throat any more than it already was as they walked.

Dean made yet another comment, asking if the guy had a house if he looked skinny enough not to eat anything at all. The man rained blow after blow to the back of Dean’s head, the side of his face, anywhere his free hand could reach all the while the knife-wielding hand dug deeper and deeper. While Dean’s eyes went glassy and dazed, Sam lunged for the man’s arm forgotten in his anger.

The man slashed at Sam’s outstretched hands, catching his palm in a clean, slicing sweep. Sam could feel the heat, the pounding of blood, and it began to drip from his fingers into the dirt.

“Stop the bleeding,” the man said. “That’s costing me money.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t slice us open ‘till you’re ready, then” Sam muttered. He didn’t get hit for it, but it wasn’t as if he had any power anyway. Dean was stumbling, half conscious in the man’s arms and Sam could feel the nerves in his hand screaming.

He made them walk to the porch of a house crumbling from the outside and Sam wasn’t sure there would running water inside after all. The windows were sagging, the roof bowing to the ground. This was the place gravity hit too hard. Where sorrow stayed close to the ground. Even the weeds refused to grow anything but brown and dead.

He brought them into the first bathroom on the bottom floor of the sparse house and Sam heaved at the sight that lay waiting. “Dean close your eyes,” Sam said, getting a kick to the side of the knee that had him teetering. Sam wasn’t sure he could put weight on it, but he refused to go down. “Dean, please. Close your eyes.”

But, it was too late. Dean was shoved into the bathroom on Sam’s heels.

Fingers hovered just above the dingy wood floor, pale and unmoving. An arm dangled from the edge of the tub. The body inside was pale, almost purple. Her hair was dark brown and touched her shoulders softly, head lolling back. Above the sink behind her, there was a spatter of blood. The slit across her throat the cause. The cause, too, of the thick red blood she was soaking inside up to her chest, staining the porcelain bathtub with it’s darkness.

It smelled like the death of a star, but this was no graveyard, this was no home.

The man made them walk up the stairs, Dean retching while Sam wiped at his eyes, into the second bathroom in the house.

They’d get to be together if they cooperated, he said, or there was another tub waiting and they could bleed out alone. Sam sighed as the man made him hang his hand over the edge of the bathtub while he put the plug inside the drain to catch even the drips he was trailing. Sam helped Dean lower himself down for a moment.

“Look,” Dean whispered as the man held the knife to the tip of Dean’s nose and made him  climb into the tub despite his weakness. Dean’s eyes were on the tiny window above the toilet and Sam turned his head slow, needing to be aware of every move the man made.

Out the window, in the daylit sky, though, there was the brightest light he’d seen since the sun’s early days. Though, it was no sun glowing through the brightness.

“Gabriel,” Sam whispered. The man hit the side of Sam’s head with the handle of the blade and Sam was sent spitting blood onto the tile speckled with black. No matter the blows, no matter his fading consciousness, Sam refused to stop repeating the name. Gabriel, Gabriel. He was watching, he was glowing. A star was cheering him on. There to witness yet another one of his deaths.

Soon, another light flicked on. Then another. The stars began to light from above, a crowd of prayers for the human below.

On the next blow, Sam shot out his bloodied hand and snagged the man’s jeans cuff, yanking just right to send him falling to the floor. It made him angry, sure, but it leveled the playing field as the knife went skittering across the floor. Sam had nothing but his body, but his was no human body. Not with the power of nebulas inside.

He began to think about Gabriel, stared out the window at him amongst the glowing daylight sky, and let himself join in. He glowed, glowed brighter than he ever had as his hearing faded into nothing but ringing. He let his hollow chest turn to fire, and then placed his burning hands on the man’s face as he lunged for Sam’s throat.

The man managed to get his fingers pressed tight against Sam’s throat. Managed to straddle his waist and dig in with his knees. Sam closed his eyes. Prayed.

His prayer was shattered by screaming. It was answered. Someone had listened.

The man above Sam screamed as the skin of his face began to melt beneath his fingertips, but Sam could only feel the vibrations of it through his chest. With the effort of it all, the blood loss and the burning from the inside, he lost all feeling. It was being born again, but with no end in sight. Lighting himself on fire forever. It burned, it burned. It burned his vision black.

Sam’s vision came back not long after judging by the brightness of the sky. When he looked closer, though, it seemed the stars had yet to refuse to dim though the sun had begun to sink. They would not give up their prayer until Sam and Dean showed their faces in daylight. Or, they were singing their mourning song.

For the risk they took by glowing so bright, all of them, Sam would not disappoint. He looked around, something heavy atop his legs. He kicked the man’s body off of him from where he lay, passed out from the pain of the burns most likely. Sam didn’t know about the fatality of dehydration after a burn so severe, didn’t know the man would have probably been dead already.

“Dean,” Sam whispered through a muffled world. “Dean.”

“Sam,” Dean rasped from the bathtub. He was staring at the ceiling, unmoved from where he’d been placed.

“Dean,” Sam said. “Come on. We have to get out of here before he wakes up.”

“Okay,” Dean said. He didn’t move an inch. Sam pulled himself into a kneel, using the edge of the tub for leverage, and with his bloodied hands cupped Dean’s face, turning his head so he would see Sam instead of the cracking ceiling.

“Dean. It’s me, Sam. Look at me, okay? Listen to me.” Dean nodded beneath his hands. “We’ve got to get out of here, you hear me. Can you move your fingers?”

Sam looked down to find Dean’s fingers wiggling, white knuckles against the porcelain. “Good, good. Okay now let’s try your feet.”

His feet knocked against each other, dirt falling from the soles of his boots into the bottom.

“Awesome,” Sam said. “You’re doing great. Now, wrap your arm around me, okay? We’re going to get you up and out of here.”

The gash on his cheekbone was showing the white of bone and he’d earned another when Sam hadn’t noticed across his neck deep enough to still be bleeding down his chest. The side of his face was swollen, one eye all the way shut and angry red.

He winced as Sam pulled them both up, his own knee threatening to give out with each step. He did not think it broken, but he had not thought the world was either. Yet, here they were in the bathroom of a man trying to sell their blood. Who was he to say what was broken?

“Thanks, Sammy,” Dean whispered against his ear as he maneuvered them through the doorway.

“Didn’t peg you for the thanking type,” Sam murmured.

“Take it back then,” Dean mumbled. “Bitch.”

“Jerk,” Sam said, heart sinking when he remembered the stairs. “Fuck, the stairs.”

“Don’t fuck the stairs,” Dean laughed, sharp and dry in his throat as more blood spilled down his shirt.

“Now, Dean? Is now really the time?” Sam hissed, staring down the stairs and wanting to cry.

“Slide down,” Dean said. “We’ve got asses for a reason.”

“You’re the ass here,” Sam said. But, it was the best option they had. It was the only way to save them both from tumbling the minute he had to step down onto his bad knee.

Outside, it was an eternity to get to where they parked, stumbling through house-littered dirt roads and uneven ground. Sam looked up on the porch steps to find the stars blinking out their applause. If the sky believed in them, he could to. He would not disappoint the ones who put their lives on the line to give him strength when he needed it. He would not let their risk be anything but worth it if Chuck asked them why they had disobeyed. He would, there had been starlight all day. Everyone had noticed.

Sam wondered why they hadn’t tried to help the star still sitting in that bathroom. Right time, right place, he supposed. The right star checking in on him down here on Earth.

The walk was long. They had to stop twice for the sound of footsteps and another time so Sam could throw up somewhere other than on top of Dean’s shoes. He’d already done that twice. His vision was swirling again, the stars dancing too fast to follow every time he looked up. It felt like hours, probably was, but Dean sniped remarks at him through semi-consciousness and they kept their pace as fast as they could manage.

“There’s Baby,” Dean mumbled. “Ain’t she pretty? Tell me she’s pretty Sammy or I’ll go deadweight on you.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Sam said. Dean went heavy in his arms and they went crashing to the ground, the Impala within sight. Sam didn’t have the energy to yell, but Dean was laughing and it flooded Sam. He joined in. Dean hadn’t been kidding after all.

“Okay, okay, up we get,” Sam said, grunting with the weight of a still-laughing Dean, and leaning him against the side of the car while he fished out Dean’s keys from his pocket. It was a miracle they made it. A miracle as he sank into the driver’s seat and let himself close his eyes for a moment after getting Dean in the back with the blankets he’d tucked in so nicely for the star left drowning in her own blood.

The glow of the stars refused to let him sleep. It tugged on his eyelids, sharp and searing. All he wanted was a moment. Of silence, of sleep. That darkness that seemed so much better than what he was feeling now. But still the light tugged at his eyes.

He gave up trying to fade. Sam knew he’d thank them for this later, and he drove as far as he could before the road was too unsteady in front of his eyes to trust anymore. He knew he’d been headed for home by where Gabriel was in the sky, but beyond that he was mindless and aching. He pulled over into a parking lot empty except for one car parked in front of a neon sign he couldn’t read, and he shut off the ignition.

His head thudded against the steering wheel but he hardly felt it. He whispered a thanks to the stars, to Gabriel, and then the blackness overtook him.

For two days they slept inside the car, Sam waking every few hours to wake Dean up and press yet another t-shirt to his neck and cheek. His vision was too unsteady, swirling each time he sat up too far to stitch it with dental floss. What if he nicked his jugular? He couldn’t watch Dean bleed out. Not after what they’d seen.

After the first day, the wound clotted and Sam finally, finally, let his shoulders relax for a moment.

He made sure they drank the water from his backpack, though he could hardly lift the gallon himself. When the lot was deserted of even the janitor, Sam made his way to the trunk to get the food Dean had stashed inside.

He forced some down his own throat, a granola bar scratching and rough, before watering Dean’s down as best he could and pressing the mush past his lips. Dean opened his eyes, commented about Sam being a mother bird and did he chew that up himself, and then fell back asleep with food still in his mouth.

On the night of the second day, Sam turned on the car and began to make his way home. Halfway through the night, Dean sputtering blood from his lips, he pressed on the gas pedal until it could go no further, and prayed the stars kept the police anywhere else.

They did. They did. No one stopped them as they pulled off the highway, Sam talking all the while about home and help despite not knowing a thing about how to nurse Dean back to health let alone himself.

As he drove into his blessedly empty town, he did not notice the light on where it had not been on before. He parked in front of Dean’s place and could not stay awake any longer, the sun long settled in the sky.

* * *

When he came to, there was humming, deep and soothing. It was what he thought the ocean might sound like in the depths of its thrumming soul. Sam did not open his eyes, for this haven of warmth and softness was one he’d love to die inside. He was sure he was dying. It was the only way the world outside had turned into anything close to this kind of beauty.


	7. Chapter 7

He opened his eyes to find the sky, alight in sun and bright bright blue. Beneath his hands were the sheets he’d stolen from the house down the street, pillows piled all around him. He racked his brain to find the part of the story where he’d gotten out of the Impala. Where he’d walked him and Dean into his home and made a bed for him somewhere. Or the part where he’d remembered getting home at all, let alone getting into bed or fetching more pillows.

He looked up and racked his brain for the part where he’d let another man into his home, hands currently touching Dean’s face as the dark-haired stranger bent over a sleeping Dean on a mattress near the door. His was the voice that was humming, though Sam didn’t see any part of the ocean about him.

“Who the hell are you?” Sam rasped through his deadened vocal cords, the situation slamming into his chest. His hurting hand had been bandaged, and when he tried to push himself into a standing position, he found there was a splint around his knee stopping him from bending it at all.

“Slow down,” the man said, looking up, but not standing. Instead, he dropped his hands from Dean’s face and sank into a cross-legged position on the floor. “I’ll stay down here, but you need to stop moving.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Castiel,” he said, and Sam’s chest went cold. It was the name of a star rolling from his lips, though Sam wasn’t sure he’d heard the name in any recent years. Not the last decade at least.

“How’d you find us?” Sam growled. There was a chance he was lying, pretending to be a star to get his defenses down. A man had tried to drain him of his blood, he would not be surprised at this point.

“I heard from a man that left here, Benny,” Castiel said. “That you had a home for our kind. I have been wandering for years.”

Sam frowned down at him, unsure of the honesty behind the man’s eyes. He was too tired, too broken, to tell if he meant what he said. Sam reasoned he wouldn’t have stitched up his hand, wouldn’t have splinted his knee, if he were there to kill them. There was no reason to pull them from the car at all.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked, looking between Castiel and Dean on the floor. “I want you to tell me everything before you do it.”

Sam was tired, but he would not leave Dean alone with a stranger in his glass house. The slightest thing could send this world shattering.

“I’m stitching up his throat first, but I’ve got to clean out the wound.”

“Is he going to be okay?” Sam asked.

“His skin will heal,” Castiel said, dabbing at Dean’s throat with a sponge quickly turning red.

Sam sat up, the world swirling. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, steadying himself with his good hand against the mattress. “Not what I asked.”

“For his heart, I cannot answer. I am only a doctor.”

“You’re a doctor doctor?” Sam asked. “Degree and everything?”

Castiel nodded, bunching his navy sweater around his elbows. “I have been on Earth for decades.”

”Why a doctor, with all that time?” Sam asked. He stood, swaying. Castiel stood, arms at his side, there just in case his gravity tipped. Sam waved him away, gestured to Dean whose neck was still gaping and cheek exposed.

“As stars we had hearts, souls of sorts, but we did not have bodies that broke like these ones. I wanted to find out how to fix them. I couldn’t stop at just me.”

“Did you give him something?” Sam asked as he used the edge of the bed to support himself while he hobbled over to Dean. Castiel may have been one of them, but Sam did not want Dean to wake up to a stranger star. Castiel, with a gentle hand, helped Sam sink into a sitting position on the edge of Dean’s mattress on the floor. “Did you give him something for the pain?”

Castiel got out his needle and readied to start threading. His hands were pristine, fingers steady and strong. Sam did not doubt those fingers, would not doubt them for one second. But he could not speak for the man they were attached to. He was strange all over.

“Yes, but it won’t last long. We burn from the inside, nothing lasts long. Learned not to rely too much on things like that. Inhibition, alcohol, anesthesia, leads to-”

On cue, Dean beneath Castiel’s fingers began to glow in his delusional sleep-pained state.

“I’ll keep that in mind. Anything else you’ve found out about our lives here?”

“Most of it’s still a mystery,” Castiel said. He finished stitching Dean’s neck in long swooping motions and moved to start stitching his face, Dean flickering beneath his fingers. Sam held his hand, despite knowing it would do nothing for Dean, until it was over and done.

“You hurting at all?” Castiel asked.

Sam shook his head. “I’ll be alright.”

Castiel nodded, packed up the doctor’s bag at his feet. “I found a place down the street a little ways, blue door. I managed to get the stove working so I’ll gather us some food. Yell if you guys need anything.”

“I will,” Sam said, thinking of the one story house with a hole in the back wall. The one with the blue door. They hadn’t taken much from that one and for Castiel, he was glad. If he had chosen a house, it seemed he might be staying. Sam hadn’t decided how he felt about the man, but he wouldn’t mind a doctor around. Especially one that had learned a thing or two about the life he was just beginning.

Dean didn’t stir so Sam hobbled back to his bed, exhausted by the effort. If this is all it took to knock him out, the journey stretching in front of him was going to be longer than he thought. It would be nice to have a doctor around, of that he was certain.

He’d keep an eye on him, though.

“I promise,” he whispered to Dean. He had let him down with the star, with the man at the house greedy for their blood. He wouldn’t let them down inside their town. This was where he had made a million promises of safety to Dean through every laugh, every word.

Castiel left soup inside thermoses on the side table beside Sam’s mattress, both of them still steaming when Sam awoke in the dark.

“Dean?” Sam called across the room.

“Sammy? You awake?” Dean whispered back.

“Yeah. You hungry? There’s soup.”

“Sounds good,” Dean said. “You’re like my fuckin’ housewife.”

“Shut up,” Sam said, hobbling his way to Dean’s mattress, falling onto it more than sitting. He was glad for the lid on the thermos, glad for the soup too when he could feel the warmth seep down his chest. “‘S good, Dean. Here.”

Dean snagged it from Sam’s hands and struggled to sit up on his elbow. “Gimme that,” he mumbled.

He sipped at the soup loudly and Sam smacked him with his casted hand, causing him to spill the soup down his shirt. Dean grumbled in his weakened state and Sam couldn’t help but laughing.

When he was done laughing, Sam helped Dean change his t-shirt and lay back down, fuller than they had been before.

Just as Dean began to nod off, Castiel poked his head through the doorway. “You guys good?”

“Yeah,” Sam whispered.

Dean mumbled in his sleep, “I loved him.”

Sam giggled at the soft side of Dean, wondering who it was he could be dreaming about. He couldn’t see Castiel at the door flinch at Dean’s words, couldn’t see the way a smile flitted across his face before he forced it back down. Couldn’t see it because he was soon asleep too, beneath the stars, stomach warm like it hadn’t been in eternities.

In the morning, Castiel sat at Dean’s bedside while Sam walked to Dean’s house to shower, promising all the while he wouldn’t get his splint or cast wet. Castiel offered to come wtih, to sit outside the door just to make sure Sam didn’t fall and lay bleeding on the tile with no one around. Sam worried about Dean, trying to do things on his own, though, and promised instead to shower with the window open so he’d be able to call for help. It was the only way he could figure they might be able to hear each other across the stretch of road that separated them.

When he got back, he told Castiel that they had hot water in that bathroom and it would do wonders for feeling like a star again. Castiel shrugged. “Haven’t really wanted to feel like a star in a long time.”

Sam got ready around the pair as Castiel redressed Dean’s wounds and make sure they weren’t getting infected. He hadn’t stirred in the night, but Castiel promised it was just a side-effect of the head trauma along with the pain meds. He hadn’t glowed at all since the night before when they’d been talking. When Cas had been touching his face.

“What happened to you guys?” Castiel asked. Sam turned to find him running his fingers through Dean’s hair. He pulled away when Sam met his eyes, and Sam wasn’t sure why.

“When I fell, I was broken. I was lost. I found this place after a while. Much better than anywhere else I ended up. Since then anytime I see a star fall, I go and fetch it. Bring it back here to heal or rest, give them a home if only temporarily.

“Dean came to me a few nights ago when a star fell, asked if he could come along. I said yes, it would be easier with two of us instead of me alone. That’s how I met Dean in the first place, fetching him after he fell,” Sam said. Dean stirred beside Castiel on his mattress, but he didn’t open his eyes. Sam lowered his voice and kept talking.

“We tracked it a few hours from here, driving the car Dean patched up, and got there just as morning broke. Hiked through this little dirt city, crumbling around us.

“When we got there,” Sam said, suddenly back to where he was on the edge of the empty crater. “The star was gone. We went searching around the area, but met only a man with a knife and a greed for our blood. Apparently it’s valuable, though you probably already know that.”

Castiel nodded. “Couldn’t let them take my blood in medical school because of it. Took breaking more than a few rules to get around that part of my physical exams.”

“He walked us to his house, this dingy place with less than we have here. Sliced Dean’s face, kicked my knee in. We had tried to fight. We tried to fight,” Sam whispered. He had failed Dean, he could feel it. “In the first bathroom, there was the body of the star that fell, swimming in her blood, slice clean across her neck. We didn’t get a moment to grieve before he brought us into the second bathroom and made Dean get inside of it. He had nicked Dean’s neck in the struggle, so the tub was already smeared with blood. Then Dean told me to look outside and Gabriel-” Sam took a moment, “the stars outside were all shining for us. Brighter than the sun.

“Because of that, I fought him off, used my star-blood to burn his face. We managed to get to the car, drove as far as I could before I passed out. Spent two days in the parking lot of a card shop. Made our way here before Dean bled to death. It was a miracle you were here.”

“I wouldn’t say a miracle,” Castiel said. “But, it is a miracle you both made it out alive. I have heard horrors like that that don’t end with anyone coming back out the front door.”

It struck Sam then, to ask of Castiel what he should have long before. “How’d you know to come here?”

Cas looked at Dean, sleeping beside him. Sam watched as Dean’s eyes fluttered open for the first time that afternoon, looking right at Castiel. Sam began to flood with dread, he hadn’t told Dean of the stranger now taking care of them. He’d panic, he’d lash out.

“Wait-” Sam began. But, Dean’s fingers were soft against Castiel’s face when he reached out to touch, and he was glowing brighter than Sam had seen him glow. Castiel, too, was threaded in starlight, illuminating the glass, all of his skin shining.

“Cas?” Dean whispered.

Castiel looked up at Sam, smiling through tear-rimmed eyes. “Dean,” he said. “Dean is how I knew to come here.”

Some of the pieces he began to make sense of. Castiel’s gentle hands, the way he brushed Dean’s hair from his forehead. Dean’s glowing just listening to Castiel speak. Sam realized the only time Dean glowed when he was on painkillers was when Castiel was in the room. Touching him. But, too many of the pieces were missing. “What?”

“I fell,” Castiel said. “Because I wanted freedom.”

Cas went stiff as Dean whispered his name again. As he looked at Dean aching. “I am the reason Dean fell.”

“Cas, wait,” Dean said, but Castiel was moving to the door. Gone in a whisper.

Sam sat in shock on the side of his bed, uncertain as to how to deal with this. Castiel had fallen. Dean had followed. Part of his was sad for them both, losing the sky. But, they had not lost each other and Sam was jealous of that. He looked to the sky and wondered why part of him wanted to ask Gabriel why they hadn’t had a love that made him follow. Part of him wanted to stop looking at the sky at all so it didn’t make Gabriel want to.

“We were in the same constellation,” Dean said. “Castiel and I.”

Sam understood. That’s what he said about him and Gabriel. It was no wonder Dean had understood without questioning a word.

“You loved him,” Sam said.

“I loved him,” Dean sighed.

“And then he fell,” Sam said after Dean had grown silent and Castiel still hadn’t returned. Sam wasn’t sure he would at all.

“And then he fell. I tried to go on without him, watched him become human, become a doctor and a friend. Watched him stop looking up, watched him keep his eyes on the ground. I’d catch him on a rooftop, a glimpse of blue eyes. But, that’s all there was for a long time. ”

“Why couldn’t you keep going?” Sam asked.

“He was the best thing about the stars. The best thing about the Earth too. Didn’t really want a life so far away from him. Even if it meant losing the sky.”

“I’m sure he’d say otherwise,” Sam said.

Dean shrugged. “I’m sure he’d say a lot of things. Blame himself for this mess we got ourselves into. He’ll forgive me for falling. I forgave him after all that shit he put me through.”

“Maybe he thought he was helping you, by not looking up anymore,” Sam said. He was thinking of the way he stopped dancing for Gabriel, the way he hadn’t looked at the sky all the night before.

“Probably,” Dean sighed. “I thought he didn’t love me anymore.”

“What changed?” Sam asked.

“He was on a rooftop, living in a house with people he hardly knew. I could hear it when he stared at the stars that night. ‘I used to be a star’ he said. ‘I used to be someone.’ There was such pain in him that night. I knew I couldn’t let him shrivel as I’d seen him doing over the years. Living with people that made him hide. Working in an office because working in the hospital got too dangerous in emergency situations, all that adrenaline. I didn’t get that part at the time, only that he left the job I could feel him loving. Left everything he loved. I had to convince myself he loved me and that’s why he left, knowing love up there is hopeless.

“That night, he prayed to me. It was a goodbye. He tried to save me, I think. Idiot.”

“He’s here, though,” Sam said. “He did save us. That means you were right.”

Dean nodded, but he didn’t say anything, just stared at the empty streets out the glass door without blinking. Silently, he flung the covers from his legs and set them against the wood, closing his eyes against the dizziness.

“Dean, don’t,” Sam pleaded. But, Dean heaved himself into a standing position and, on swaying feet, made his way to the door.

“You head-strong fool,” Cas grumbled, appearing on the other side in an instant. He had been sitting against one of the pillars where they could not see him curled. He had been deciding if he should stay here at all, knowing what he’d done to Dean. “Lay back down.”

Dean shook his head, letting Cas steady him with hands on Dean’s hips. He dropped his head against Cas’s shoulder and Sam had to look away from the door and the daylight.

“I missed you,” Dean whispered against Cas’s shirt. Cas’s anger broke then, dissolved like dust on a planet it didn’t belong. He slid his fingers into Dean’s hair on the side of his head that wasn’t swollen and tender. Sighed against Dean, celestial. Two stars had fallen in love, fallen from the sky. They had found each other again.

“I missed you too,” Castiel said. Their embrace stretched into a shuffling slow dance of sorts and Sam turned his back on them to give them some privacy. There wasn’t anywhere they could hide in this glass room of his. But, he could close his eyes, he could avert his gaze. He would try his best to give them all the room they deserved to work out what they were again. He knew it would be foreign and strange, these bodies together as opposed to those in the sky. But, he knew too, by the glow reflecting off the glass, that it would be beautiful.

He was glad to be around to see it, though he knew it would hurt too. Gabriel still hung in the sky and he couldn’t decide what he would give everything for faster: to keep him there or to bring him down here to touch his skin just once.

“I’m going to go,” Sam said, head down while he was pulling on his boots. “To, uh, the lake. Or the market.”

“Do you need any help?” Castiel asked, muffled and half-hearted. Sam brushed him off. He was leaving to give them privacy after all. To figure their shit out without another pair of ears around.

He sat by the river, thinking of the fish that leaped to freedom and wondered if he knew what he was doing when he jumped. Sam knew nothing of this world, knew nothing of what he was doing. Who knew if this was his leap, settling into a life down here. One of more freedom than the sky.

* * *

The week later, Castiel came up behind him in the river, Dean and Sam’s bloodstained clothing in his arms. Sam was drifting, floating on the water but feeling nothing like Saturn or anything from the sky because Cas forced him to wrap his wounds in plastic. He closed his eyes in the coolness of the water and let his hands float against the stream anyhow. It was not the sky, but it was nice and he couldn’t complain about that.

“So, you know why you fell?” Sam asked.

“Chuck made that very clear before he sent me falling,” Castiel said, scrubbing at Dean’s t-shirt. The water around his hands swirled red and Sam had to look back to the sky where it was blue and untouched by anything as ugly as blood.

“You got to talk to him before you fell?” Sam asked. “I got nothing but silence.”

“I pushed too far, tried to get everyone to break their positions. I was tired of the stagnation. We were meant to be beautiful, but we were never meant to stand still.”

“How do you know?”

“Didn’t you feel the itch?” Castiel asked. “The craving to move through the night?”

Sam thought of the itch now, after the stars awoke and the wood glistened in the moonlight. He nodded, waiting for more. “What happened?”

“People listened. For one night, my constellation was free. The next night, I was down here with four broken ribs and a sky that wept with my heart.”

“You got a rainstorm send-off?”

“I got thunder. I got soaked.”

“How’d you do it, without anyone?”

“How did you?” Castiel asked back. “You never found out why?”

Sam shook his head. “I have a theory.”

“Yeah?”

“I fell in love,” Sam muttered, swimming through the water. He shook his hair out when he reemerged and found Castiel looking at him.

“Are they…”

“Still in the sky,” Sam sighed. “I’m trying to keep it that way.”

“I tried too. Didn’t work quite as I wanted it to.”

“That’s why I’m not sure the love went both ways,” Sam said, a whisper amongst the gentle march of the river. “At least it kept him in the sky.”

“That’s not the only thing that matters,” Castiel said. “Though I wanted the same for Dean.”

“Which is better?” Sam asked. The sky or the Earth?

Castiel shrugged, moving on to scrub the blood from Sam’s t-shirt too. “Who knows. All I know is there’s no way back and the stars are still beautiful from down here.”

“They are, aren’t they,” Sam said.

Cas was silent, scrubbing, for a minute. “Which one are they?”

“Come by my place tonight. I’ll tell you all about him.”

“I can tell you about how to cope,” Castiel said. “Or, how to try anyway.”

“That’d be great.” Sam dove back into the water, chasing the fish that darted from his grasp. He did not want to catch one. Just wanted feel their shimmering scales. Like the stars, they shined. Like the stars, they were always, always out of reach.

* * *

The three of them pushed mattresses together beneath the hole in the sky. Dean crammed himself in the middle, Sam and Cas on either side. Sam made no comment when Dean and Cas’s hands wound up interlinked. It made him want to glow to see such a small happiness in this ever-stretching world.

Castiel told Sam and Dean about how to be half-human and half-star. How to shimmer in a way that drew no attention. How to hide the stardust inside their veins. He gave them some cash for emergencies. Sam put it in his backpack by the door.

Sam pointed out Gabriel in the sky. Cas’s breath caught when Gabriel started to flicker as Sam said his name aloud. He hadn’t said it since the accident, Sam realized. It had been far too long to thank him for his help. He was quiet after that. They all were.

“Think I’ll try my hand at stairs tonight,” Dean said, breaking the silence. He made no mention of the glistening stars reflected in the tears sliding down Sam’s cheeks, dripping into the pillowcase under his head. “Care to help me Cas?”

Sam knew it was for him that they hobbled their way out of the door with goodnights tossed over their shoulders. Knew it was for him Dean forced his way up the stairs long before he should have. It made Sam all the more heartbroken. He hurt everyone around him.

When Cas walked Dean to his own place for the first time since the attack, Sam pushed Dean’s mattress out of the way, his own too, and he stood in the center of the room. He could hear Cas’s voice warning him against wasting his life spending too much time trying for the sky again. There was no way back. It was time to accept that. He would thank Gabriel, thank him for everything there was to thank him for, and then he wouldn’t dance beneath the stars again.

“This is for you, Gabriel,” Sam said.

He began to dance in the center of the stars, eyes on Gabriel and Gabriel alone. He put everything into it, started spinning on his toes slow. He sped up, matching the swirling of the stars, the shakiness of the world until all of the glass turned into starlight and he couldn’t feel the floor anymore.

He slowed down his spin, finding gravity again. This is how it would end, his love story of the stars doomed to die on Earth. It would end planted on the ground, it would end with steady feet and a steady gaze and a heart that shattered in his chest.

“Whoa,” Castiel breathed by the door.

Sam startled, turning from the sky, knowing it would be the end of constantly staring up at it. “I was-”

“Saying goodbye,” Castiel said. “I could see that. I did it too.”

“How’d you do it?” Sam asked, sitting down on the floor, leaning against the glass of the window next to the door. Castiel paused a moment and then sank down next to him.

“I prayed to him. I hadn’t ever prayed before,” Castiel said.

“He heard you.” Sam said.

Cas shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It was more for me than for him.”

Sam nodded. He thought the same was probably true here. He said goodbye so he could move on. Move on he would. He would, though his heart had shattered inside his soul. He would.

* * *

They were eating breakfast at the table inside Dean’s place when Castiel asked them if they’d ever broken into the library on the other side of town. Both of them shook their heads, Dean shrugging at Cas’s shock.

“No food, no meds, no booze,” Dean said. “What would we need anything from in there for?”

“I’m going today,” Castiel said.

“Why?” Sam asked. He was insistent, urgent. What could be that important in a stale library of the past?

“We need to know what happened here. Why everyone left their pictures behind.”

Sam nodded. That much was peculiar. It had to have been something bad for the wallets and single shoes left in the middle of the street. Something had happened and they had no way to tell if it was coming back.

“I’m in,” Sam said, finishing his plate of bacon and toast and sliding from the stool at Dean’s counter to wash the dishes from breakfast.

“Guess I’ll tag along,” Dean said. “Nerds, both of you.”

“Whatever,” Sam said.

“At least we don’t call our car Baby,” Cas shot back, nudging Dean with his hip. Dean huffed, but his cheeks were pink when Cas kissed his forehead on his way to put his own dishes in the sink. Sam resisted the urge to tease him. A macho man with a soft heart was nothing to be ashamed of. That meant there was only beauty inside those muscles, only a heart that knew what it meant to bleed. There was no shame in that or all of them would have been an embarrassment.

He was glad for Dean’s happiness. He deserved every bit of it for the way he saved Sam from so much loneliness.

They were walking through the streets, Castiel tucked under Dean’s arm as they made their way up the stone steps when Sam happened to look up and catch a glimpse of the star streaking through sky. It was a star he knew. The only star he’d know in an instant.

Gabriel was hurtling towards the Earth. His love had come crashing down.


	8. Chapter 8

Castiel and Dean had made their way up the stairs to the library, at the door that led inside, Dean holding the door for Sam. The door squeaked as he waited for Sam’s response, boot shifting against the wooden door.

“You coming?” he called.

“I forgot to do something,” Sam said, not taking his eyes off the sky. “I’ll catch up with you guys later.”

“Everything okay?” Dean asked. “You look weird. Someone pissed on my puppy and gave it a disease, and made you watch it die weird.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Fine,” Sam mumbled before turning on his heel, resisting the urge to sprint the entire way to Gabriel where he’d be smashing into the Earth. If he could blanket the world, if he could turn his soul into a cushion, there would be no hesitation. He would already have his fist inside his chest, would have already laid it in the dirt to catch Gabriel’s fall.

He had just given up on the sky. How strange, it finally decided to come to him instead.

As he peeled out of Dean’s garage, there was a whisper in the back of his mind, itching. Gabriel had heard his goodbye. Gabriel had fallen because he did not want it to be just that.

He tried to convince himself not to think about it. To focus on making sure he had everything he needed to get Gabriel back here safe and patched up. Food, water, medicine. He went over the list in his head, but each time thoughts of Gabriel came back, thoughts Sam hadn’t let himself think since the fall. Thoughts of Gabriel, dancing. Thoughts of Gabriel, touchable. Sam wondered if his skin felt as vibrant as his starlight. Wondered what he’d look like as a human.

He hadn’t ever figured out how they got their human bodies. They were formed from their stardust ashes, that much he knew. But, for their looks he knew nothing of their choosing. Must have had something to do with their personalities, the way Dean and Castiel seemed to slide so easily into theirs. How Dean’s hands were rough and made to work in oil. How Castiel’s shoulders seemed ready to hold human lives, steady and strong.

Sam looked down at his hands to find them glowing. Rummaging through his backpack, he tugged on a long sleeve black t-shirt. He’d need it, where he was going. He’d need to hide every inch of skin when just the thought of Gabriel had him sunlight-bright and glittering.

He thought briefly about Dean and Cas back home. Thought he maybe should have brought one of them along for rationality purposes. But, Gabriel was waiting. He could be dying. Sam had no time to waste. He’d just be careful. He could manage. He had faced the worst of the world, after all, and he was still breathing.

Sam wasn’t sure the prayers still worked after they fell from the sky, but he prayed to Gabriel anyway. Told him to hang tight. Told him it would hurt and Sam was sorry for it. Told Gabriel he was coming as fast as he could and not to worry about a thing but surviving just long enough.

Sam thanked Chuck the roads were paved. That he hadn’t fallen in a time of bootprints in the dirt. Cursed himself for hoping for Gabriel to fall, thanked Chuck for it too.

He stopped at a gas station with nothing around for miles. The attendant had dead eyes and frown lines. To live in this empty world was to become it. Sam hoped his town was never this empty, hoped he never had eyes that looked like that. Wilting, weeping. He did not think he could live that way.

When the smell of the sky seeped through the closed windows, sliding its whisping fingers beneath the crack in the doorframe, Sam tucked a knife into his sock, another into his belt. Just in case there was another on the hunt for blood.

He refused to picture Gabriel in that bathtub. Refused to imagine that kind of end to a beautiful star. Sam wasn’t sure what he’d do if that’s what lay on the other side of the trees he was parked beside. He shook the thoughts from his head and took the keys from the ignition.

Sam hurried through the trees, boots crashing far too loudly for any resemblance of stealth. If there were people around, they would know he was coming. It didn’t matter. Gabriel needed to know he was near. He’d be alone, shivering beneath the night, bleeding and broken. It was for Gabriel that he did not hide his footfalls. That he did not stop himself from shining.

Voices drifted through the trees as he approached and Sam froze in his step. They were angry voices, sharp and cutting through the starlight. Sam hid his glow, slid his boots from his feet, leaning against the treebark.

He carried forward slower, now, peering through the trees before every step he made. If there were voices, if there was anger, Sam had to steel himself for what he’d find. He was good at that, turning his heart into steel. It had been broken so many times it was patched up with metal anyhow.

Through the trees, he could see a dozen people, wrapped in a semicircle, all their backs turned. None of them noticed as he stepped closer, but he kept his distance anyway. He watched them yell for a moment, caught words like ‘alien’ and ‘sky’. Sam realized what it was they were wrapped around and he dropped his boots in his haste to push through the crowd. To put himself between them and the star turned man he knew was lying in the middle of that crater.

He pushed between a man and woman holding hands as they screamed down the dirt, not hesitating as he threw himself down the crater in his socks to get to the center.

Inside the middle, arms wrapped around his legs, was Gabriel, blood matting his forehead. They had begun to throw things into the center of the crater, bottles and coins littering the dirt beneath Sam’s feet. Shards of glass lay close to Gabriel and Sam could see small gashes scattering the skin on his legs.

As Sam approached, Gabriel began to scramble backwards, eyes wild and unfocused. “Hey, hey,” Sam said. “It’s okay. I’m here to help.”

Gabriel stopped moving backwards, hands bleeding from glass he had scrambled over in his haste. Sam held up his own hands, sank down into the dirt. He made himself smaller. Something easier to trust. He shrugged the flannel off his shoulders slowly, held it out to Gabriel. “For the cold,” Sam said.

He got no reaction in return, not a whisper, not a blink. Sam wondered just how long those people had been standing on the edge of the crater, just how long it would be until they stopped caring about the edge anymore. Before they were brave enough to throw fists instead of glass bottles.

“Gabriel?” he whispered, crowding in on Gabriel where he was curled, trying to find any sign of recognition. Maybe his head had been damaged in the fall. Maybe he’d forgotten how to exist without the sky. Still there was nothing from Gabriel, though Sam could see him shivering. He left the flannel at Gabriel’s feet and pulled the knife from where it was tucked into his belt.

Sam turned to the people on the edge as a bottle shattered at his feet, and he narrowed his eyes on the one in the center shouting the loudest. He was a shorter man than Sam, round but with little muscle mass. Sam would pummel him if he had to. He could with ease.

“Get out of here,” he yelled, running up the edge of the crater with the knife outstretched. The man lunged back, stumbling steps. Sam knew he had to keep going. Had to make him back down. Some men took this and turned it into anger, lunged back at the knife swinging at them. Sam couldn’t back down, couldn’t chance it. Not when Gabriel lay in the center of the crater, drowning in the dirt.

Sam gained on the man stumbling backwards and he tumbled to the floor, scrambling against the rock and dirt to get back to a standing position. The rest of the crowd followed suit as the man took off through the trees. They thought this was entertainment, thought it was a threat. None of them saw the broken man in the middle of the Earth, lost in a foreign world. It was easy to miss if they only saw the crater and the comet falling down. It was easy to miss if they didn’t see Gabriel at all.

After the crowd dispersed and disappeared, Sam hurried back down to the center of the crater where Gabriel hadn’t moved an inch. The flannel hung off one side of his body, his hands tangled inside it. At least he had tried to stop the blood. Sam hadn’t seen him blink a single time, though he noticed now there were silent tears sliding down his face.

“Hey,” Sam said, cradling Gabriel’s face in his hands. Part of him wanted to shake him, to scream in his face, to do anything to get him to look at Sam. To see it was him. React.

When Gabriel’s eyes found Sam’s, there was nothing of recognition beneath the gold that swirled like galaxies.

“Gabriel?” Sam whispered, heart breaking with each moment it took for Gabriel to recognize him. For Gabriel to show any sign of life. What had happened to his beautiful star, to everything shining and alive?

“Gabriel, it’s me,” Sam said, voice breaking. “Don’t you remember me?”

Gabriel’s gaze drifted, slowly, to somewhere over Sam’s shoulder, dull and unseeing.

“Me. Samuelon.” He hadn’t said his star name in what felt like years. Maybe Gabriel just couldn’t recognize him. It was overwhelming, Sam could attest to that. “Gabriel. Please.”

His eyes were drifting back to Sam, but no where close to seeing him. Sam sighed, let a sob escape his throat before he swallowed the rest down. He let his hands fall from Gabriel’s face. Turned and ran up the crater’s edge to grab the backpack he’d dropped with his boots.

He brought it back down with steady feet, making sure the treeline was still clear of spectators. It was only wood and an awakening sky when he looked. Sam breathed a shaky sigh of relief.

“I’m going to patch up this cut on your head, okay?” Sam asked. It was futile. Gabe hardly flinched when Sam began to dab at the gash with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol. It wasn’t deep enough to still be bleeding, but it was deep enough to hurt when he touched it. But, Gabriel didn’t move, just stared off into the trees.

“I’m going to stitch it up now, okay? It’s going to hurt,” Sam warned. Gabriel nodded absent-mindedly but Sam wouldn’t put money on him being able to repeat what he had said.  “I’ve got clothes in the bag for you. Wasn’t sure what size you’d end up. Don’t really get a choice when it comes to bodies after the fall.”

He slid the needle through Gabriel’s forehead. The blankness was driving him crazy. He chattered to cover it up. Talked about the day he fell. About Jody and Charlie. Dean and Castiel waiting back at home. Talked about the town they were headed towards, about how perfect it was for people like them. He did not talk about the dancing. Didn’t want to know whether or not Gabriel had seen his goodbye ballet. Castiel was right. It had been for himself more than anyone.

He finished stitching Gabriel’s forehead and helped him get dressed from the clothing in his backpack. Gabriel was limp all the while, letting Sam move him into the clothing without resistance.

“Okay, Gabriel. Let’s get you out of here,” Sam said. Gabriel looked up at him, flannel swallowing his shoulders. He blinked at Sam, but he didn’t say anything. Sam sighed, shrugged the backpack onto his back.

Dust falling from his fingers, Sam scooped Gabriel into his arms, tucking his head against his chest.

“Sam,” Gabriel murmured as Sam began to move up the crater’s wall. Though it was weak, though it was a whisper in a world of screaming, it was enough. Sam tucked him closer, tightened his grip. Gabriel was shivering, Sam could feel it against his chest. Could feel the blood on Gabriel’s forehead seeping through his own t-shirt. It was fine. A shirt was easy to clean, a heartbreak far less so.

Sam tucked Gabriel into the backseat cursing himself when he saw the emptiness that waited back there. In his haste, he had forgotten the blankets still drying by the river. They still held Dean’s blood. Sam wasn’t sure he wanted Gabriel’s introduction to the world to be laying atop the remnants of their attack. It would seep into his perception of this world, he was convinced it would.

After the voices berating him inside his crater, Gabriel didn’t need a reminder of the cruelty of humans. First he needed to know how they touched so softly. How they laughed from their stomachs. How their hearts beat in the most comforting march. The way they moved their bodies when they swam, or danced, or grinned. The way they built such beautiful melodies, the way they turned glass into shelter.

Sam, with Gabriel’s legs hanging out of the open door, dressed the cuts on his legs from the glass. They were not deep, but they were many and Sam ran out of band aids long before he was done. For the rest, he smeared anti-infection cream on them and hoped it would be enough to keep out the dirt Gabriel was still covered in from the explosion of his arrival.

He set a bottle of water, already opened, next to Gabriel on the seat along with a granola bar from his backpack. “Eat this,” Sam said. “Please.”

Gabriel didn’t move towards it, but Sam opened the wrapper anyway. Just in case he decided to eat it during the drive. They had a few hours ahead of them. He would have time to feel his hunger, his thirst. He would have time to get past the shock and pain of falling, start to feel the pain of the present.

Sam moved Gabriel’s legs from the door and shut it softly at his side, warning him of the noise in advance. Through the window, Sam could see him flinch. He rounded the Impala, opting not to open the trunk to put his backpack away. Instead, he tossed it onto the passenger seat and, movements defined and deliberate. He turned on the car, lowering the volume of the music as it began blasting something heavy and heart pounding. In the rear-view mirror, he could see Gabriel curling against the doorway, eyes outward and unseeing, gash on his forehead angry still. Sam turned the radio to classical, the heart of ballet, and he left the front two windows down. Just while they drove away.

Sam had lost the sky, but he had not lost his love for the smell of it. He’d sink in every scent of it while they were close.

Gabriel did not seem to mind the wind. He did not seem to notice it at all. He blinked out the window, forehead pressed against it, and stared at the passing trees. After twenty minutes, the smell was gone and Sam turned to Gabriel.

“Did you want me to roll up the windows?”

Gabriel shrugged, still staring out the window. Sam sighed and rolled them up. They were about to hit the highway anyway, the wind would get loud.

“Are you feeling okay?” Sam asked. “Anything you need before we hit the highway?”

Gabriel shook his head, but his eyebrows were furrowed. They had started to pick up speed, the pianos crashing on the radio flooding the car. Sam reached to turn it down, to turn it off, thinking it was too many things happening at once for Gabriel.

“Is a highway one of those rivers?” Gabriel asked suddenly, ten minutes and miles since Sam last spoke. He was talking about how from above, the winding roads looked a lot like the rivers used to when the world was younger and more green. The way they could follow the roads across the entire planet and still have more left, running. It took concentrating, to see that far, so Sam didn’t do it often. Only when Gabriel wanted to play a game of tracing, of picking a starting point and guessing where the road would end and then tracing it to see who was closer. It was always Gabriel. He loved the way the roads wound. “Freedom,” he had said once. “Like chasing the edge of the clouds.”

“Yes,” Sam said. “You’ll love the real rivers too. Feels like floating again.”

Gabriel turned back out the window, but Sam wasn’t so worried about his silence. He was grieving, and for being so alive in his happiness it was no wonder he was so quiet when he had lost everything. He felt everything in its extreme. His world had died beneath his fingers and yet it still hung in the sky. Taunting. Always out of reach.

It was an hour into the drive, Sam glanced back to see Gabriel finally sipping from the water he’d opened and left for him. He said nothing, averted his eyes from the mirror. He was a fallen star, a wild soul lost from where he knew. He would startle, curl in. Sam did not want his gaze to be the reason he did not hydrate his aching body. He heard the rustle of the granola bar wrapper and hid the smile behind his hand.

“Here,” Sam said, pulling the smaller t-shirt he’d packed from his backpack in case the star had taken a smaller form. He tossed it back to Gabriel, careful to avoid hitting him with it so he would no flinch. “Ball it up and use it as a pillow.”

Gabriel grabbed the t-shirt slowly, crammed it beneath his head against the window. Still he watched Sam in the mirror, still he stared. Sam thought maybe he was scared of him, so he tried to smooth his movements even more, hunched his shoulders behind the seat as best he could. There was no minimizing himself any further, but he’d try. For Gabriel, he’d try.

“It’s okay,” Sam said, reaching gently to turn the music down. “You can sleep.”

Gabriel met his eyes in the mirror, his narrowed and watching. Sam sighed. “Seriously, if I wanted to hurt you why would I have bothered to get you out of the crater? Get you clothes? Feed you?”

Gabriel frowned, thinking. “Tell me something only Samuelon would know.”

“You like watching the humans on Halloween the best. You race the clouds on stormy days. When the moon is at its closest, you let yourself shine a bit softer so she can be the center of attention for the night.

“Once, decades ago, an asteroid almost hit you. I still have nightmares about that,” Sam said. “By daylight, still you dance.”

Gabriel in the mirror was watching Sam with more intensity than Sam had seen the entire trip. Sam said, “You have never done anything for anyone but yourself.”

Gabriel turned out the window, lips pressed. Sam looked away from the mirror, face burning. He had asked for one thing, thousands had surfaced. Gabriel, leaning in on Halloween night. Gabriel, soaring through the cloudy sky. Gabriel dimmer, eyes on the moon. Gabriel, about to be crushed. That had been before Sam knew him, it only started haunting him after he fell in love. Before, it had been a fear for himself, something potentially knocking him out of the sky. After, it was a fear for Gabriel, of something that would knock Sam’s world from the sky.

“You’re wrong about that last one,” Gabriel whispered, and Sam waited for an explanation. Anything to follow the whisper in the empty car now that the music was gone. By the time Sam stopped waiting for a response, he looked back to find Gabriel sound asleep against the window. He sighed with relief. He had given enough proof to comfort him. He had allowed him to sleep in this strange world. That was a miracle of itself. Sam knew how terrified he was that first night.

While Gabriel slept, Sam tried not to weep openly for the star Gabriel had been in the sky. For the grief he was going through. For his introduction on Earth being so harsh and full of anger. For everything this had led to and everything there was still left to suffer through. Sam wondered why he fell in the end, but he doubted there’d ever be an explanation. They had not led a rebellion, neither of them grand enough to justify a visit from Chuck himself. It would always be a mystery, the reason for their pain.

By the time Gabriel blinked awake and asked for more water, Sam had silently cried himself dry. He had wiped his eyes and steeled his face long since he’d turned off the highway.

He opened the top of the water and handed it back without meeting Gabriel’s eyes in the mirror. He did not want to see the pain that Sam knew would be there. Did not want to see the exhaustion, the shock, golden eyes misplaced in this world.

“Almost there,” Sam said. His voice was cracking, he cleared his throat and hoped Gabriel hadn’t noticed. In the mirror, Gabriel nodded. He didn’t say a word for the rest of the drive.

When he pulled into the town, Sam slowed, tires crunching on the dirt. Dean rushed from the inside of the garage before Sam even put the car in park, yelling through the window.

“Where the hell were you? God, Sam, you didn’t say a goddamn word. We were terrified,” Dean yelled, yanking open the driver’s side door. “Cas walked a mile in each direction, thinking maybe you were snagged or fell into that fucking river or something stupid. What the hell man?”

Cas appeared on the doorstep at the top of Dean’s staircase, arms folded and unmoving. He had been terrified, Sam could see it in the slump of relief across his shoulders. The flush of guilt was nauseating. He had no idea the panic he had put them through. Hadn’t thought of them in his own panic.

Gabriel coughed in the backseat and Sam remembered why this was worth it. Remembered why he hadn’t said a word before he took off.

Dean was still yelling, but Sam just held his hands up. With an even voice, Sam said, “Dean.”

“Are you fucking kidding? You’re asking me to shut up? After how worried we both were, I don’t even get to be angry?”

“Don’t you want to know why?” Sam asked, keeping his voice calm and measured in Dean’s anger. It would not help anyone to raise it.

“What?” Dean said.

“I said,” Sam said, standing from the car, stepping around Dean to round the front of the car. “Don’t you want to know why I disappeared? Where I’ve been?”

“Who gives a fuck why you left, I want to know why you didn’t tell one of us. Leave a goddamn note,” Dean said, following Sam around the car.

“Hang on a sec,” Sam said, getting to the back passenger side door and opening it slow, kneeling in front of Gabriel.

Dean sputtered, going off about the panic he put them through, put Cas through. Sam rolled his eyes, crouching near Gabriel.

“Hey,” Sam said. “You good to walk or do I need to carry you?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Don’t know if I can.”

Sam nodded, reaching to slip the seatbelt from Gabriel’s torso. “I’ll carry you for now, just in case.”

Gabriel nodded, reaching to wrap his arms around Sam’s neck as he pulled him from the backseat. This time, he could help hold his weight and Sam lifted him with ease.

“So you up and left for a fucking star? Don’t you remember what happened last time? You could have been killed!”

“Dean, Cas,” Sam said, meeting Dean’s eyes and letting all that sadness he’d hidden through the drive flood him. “This is Gabriel.”

He turned to Dean who cut off mid rant, Cas freezing halfway down the stairs. Sam did not wait for anymore questions, did not wait for anything. He carried Gabriel towards his glass haven, telling him all about how the stars would look when the sun finally set all the way that night.

Castiel surged forward, opening the door to the room in front of Sam so he wouldn’t have to fumble with the handle. Sam’s bed was made, Dean’s mattress missing from the floor. He shrugged and laid Gabriel on his own bed, tucking him beneath the blankets. When he pulled back, he noticed a wince on Gabriel’s face and he knelt at his side, close. “What is it? What hurts?”

Gabriel shifted, shaking his head. “Nothing, just a cut I think.”

Sam pulled Gabriel forward, leaned to look at his back. Sam’s stomach plummeted. His shirt was soaked with blood from mid back to his waist.

“Fuck. You should have told me,” Sam said, lifting Gabriel’s shirt to find a gash across his back diagonal across his spine. It was seeping more blood than Sam was comfortable with. Enough for panic to surge. “Cas?”

Castiel was instantly at Gabriel’s side, hands hovering. Before he touched, he looked Gabriel in the eye. “Gabriel? I’m Castiel. I used to be a star too. I’m a doctor so I’m going to take a look at you, if that’s alright?”

Gabriel nodded and Sam moved out of the way, pulling the shirt over his head to get it out of Cas’s way. While Castiel worked on checking for spine damage and stitching the wound after giving Gabriel a numbing ointment to the area, Sam set about making the bed as comfortable as possible, piling the extra pillows Dean had left behind around his body.

“Gabriel, I’m going to go to the car to get my backpack alright?” Sam said. Castiel had finished stitching his back, helped him turn onto his stomach to sleep. He checked him over in his entirety, the stitches Sam had put in his forehead getting a mediocre stamp of approval.

“Wait,” Gabriel whispered. He had not said a word since they got here. Sam froze in his step.

“I’ll get it,” Castiel said, already moving towards the door. He clapped an arm on Sam’s shoulder. “You stay.”

“Okay,” Sam said, turning. “Okay.”

Gabriel’s eyes were drifting shut already, but he turned his head to find Sam as he approached the bedside. “Don’t go.”

And Sam knew it was a safety thing, being the only one he knew in a world he knew nothing of, knew he meant nothing by it but self-preservation. But, he could not help the slight glow that seeped from his fingers. Gabriel had asked Sam to stay.

Sam sank down against the bedframe on the side of the bed Gabriel was facing and tucked his knees against his chest. After all the driving, all the panic, Sam hadn’t slept a wink. Hadn’t eaten a thing. It rushed in on him now, the exhaustion, the panic, the guilt. He didn’t have enough energy to pick up his head, but he glad to have chosen somewhere Gabriel could see him any time he opened his eyes.

He slept at Gabriel’s bedside, as the stars woke up. He was not missing anything. The best part was at his back, whimpering into the bed.


	9. Chapter 9

Sam’s back was aching, his stomach eating itself from the inside when he blinked awake. It was still night, darkness falling all around the glass when he opened his eyes and stretched his neck, letting his legs fall from his arms, his nerves asleep and tingling.

He turned, finding Gabriel’s eyes closed, head turned to the side. Sam checked his wound, making sure Castiel had patched it up nicely and it was not still bleeding before he started to move around the room. Before he took a step, he kicked off his shoes, padding in his socks so it would be closer to silence.

On the table by the door, there were two thermoses and a note.

_Glad you’re okay. Don’t scare me like that again, bitch._

Sam grinned, knowing Dean understood. Knowing he’d still be angry for the fear he’d caused, for the pain.

In the thermos he found the most delicious smelling potato soup and he carried the other over to the night table beside where Gabriel slept. His own he drained within minutes, relishing the warmth in his stomach. This pleasure alone was almost enough to glow, that’s how long he’d gone without eating.

Sam stood in the doorway, staring at the empty road. Behind him, Gabriel blinked awake, silent and studying Sam in the doorway. Sam didn’t notice, just kept staring out at the silence, wondering, wondering what it would take to get Gabriel to love him again. Wondering what it would be to never have his love again. Something so grand had kept him alive, what could he do after the loss of something so beautiful?

For now, he’d take care of Gabriel. Make sure he was okay. Keep him healthy, keep him safe. It was his job, the one he’d chosen, no matter how it hurt to see empty eyes each time Gabriel looked at him.

“Sam?” Gabriel rasped from the bed. Sam turned, hurrying over, helping him get his thermos open and to sip from the steaming bottle. Gabriel sat up despite the stitches in his back, dangling his feet over the edge of the bed. He turned to Sam, eyes fuller than they were before. The golden galaxies inside began to swirl, expand. Sam had never seen human Gabriel look so alive. He bit back everything he wanted to say and sat down next to Gabriel in his borrowed clothing.

“You feeling okay?” Sam asked. He was asking about the pain, about hunger, about thirst.

Gabriel turned to look at him, tears brimming. He shook his head. He was weeping for the hole in his chest, the magnificent thing he used to be torn from him. He was weeping for what he’d lost. He’d never be okay.

Sam nodded. He understood. “I used to feel the same.”

“How could you get past this?” How could you forget what we were, Gabriel thought to himself.

Sam shrugged. “You just do. I refuse to let the Earth make me smaller than the sky did.”

Gabriel curled in on himself, stitches pulling. “I’m tired.”

Sam stood, with one look back, and he went away. Went to just outside the doorway where he sank against the brick pillar and sat, listening through the cracked-open doorway for anything beyond the sound of Gabriel sobbing. He could not heal this pain, but he’d be there to feel it with him. It was the least he could do for Gabriel.

When Gabriel fell asleep, still weeping, Sam went to Dean’s house and filled a bucket with warm water. Castiel eyed him cautiously, but Sam shook him off. “I’ll be careful.”

“Don’t get the stitches wet.”

Sam nodded, snagged a pile of washcloths from Dean’s bathroom counter. He carried the load back to his place, knelt at Gabriel’s side.

With each washcloth, he dipped it in the steaming water, wrung it out, and laid it across his forehead, his chest, his shoulders. He may not be a star, but Sam would make sure he felt like one for as long as he wanted to. For as long as he needed to to survive.

Gabriel stirred beneath his hands as the heat began to sink into his chest, through his skin. He was burning and bright again. He blinked up and saw Sam, hands hovering, and muttered something close to thank you before he fell asleep again, tears no longer falling.

Outside, night had begun, darkness swirling with the light. Sam stared up at it from his own bed, wishing for an empty space to dance through what he was feeling. So lost, so broken, so confused. Would a dance help him make sense of it? Of all of this mess?

Dean and Cas showed up carrying a mattress between the two of them. They set it close to Gabriel’s. Cas nodded at Sam before heading back to Dean’s place, but Dean lingered, sinking onto the ground beside Sam.

“You good?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Sam said.

“You could’ve asked me to come. We wouldn’t have questioned anything,” Dean said. His voice was soft.

“I know. I wanted to be alone in case,” Sam’s voice caught. “In case he was dead when I got there.”

Dean sucked in a breath, nodding. “I get it man. You scared us, is all.”

“I know,” Sam said. He began to sob. For Dean and Cas. For Gabriel. Dean sat with him all the while, head back against the brick. He stayed for hours until long after Sam had stopped crying. Stayed until they were trading stories of the stars.

Dean finished one about a time Mars almost took him out of the sky. Sam paused, needing to tell someone about what had happened on the trip he just got back from.

“There were people on the edge of his crater when I got there,” Sam said. Dean froze at his side. “Yelling, red all over. Someone threw something made of glass down at him. That’s where all those cuts came from.”

“No wonder he’s so quiet,” Dean said, cursing under his breath. “Not a pretty way to wake up in this place.”

Sam shook his head, listening for a moment to make sure Gabriel was still asleep.

“Think he’ll be okay?” Dean asked.

“He’s so different from what he was in the sky,” Sam said. “I don’t know.”

“Sounds like a fighter,” Dean said. “I think he’ll get better. Closer to what you remember anyway.”

“You think so?”

Dean nodded, nudging Sam with his knee. “I do. Now, go get some sleep. You look like a dog shit you out.”

“You’re not so great yourself,” Sam called. It was true. Dean had bags under his eyes like he hadn’t slept in years, skin paler than it had been before Sam left.

Dean shrugged. “Like I said, we were worried sick.”

* * *

A week later, Gabriel was itching to get moving and Cas agreed to pull the stitches from his back as long as he took it easy. Sam didn’t think it a good idea, but keeping Gabriel cooped up wasn’t good either. One of them had to cave and Sam would always be that one between the two of them.

Sam went for a walk in the morning. He came back to find Cas and Gabriel whispering to each other, far more words than Sam had heard Gabriel say since he fell. It hurt him to see, a burning he didn’t deserve to feel. He swallowed his disappointment, hearing words like fell and fault and Earth.

Sam left them alone, going to the river to become weightless again. It did nothing for the ache in his chest. That seemed too heavy to leave behind.

When he came back still dripping water from his hair, Castiel was gone and Gabriel was sitting on the edge of his bed, twisting his back this way and that. Sam smiled. “You know you’re not supposed to do exactly that.”

Gabriel looked up, grinned for the first time Sam had seen him grin with these lips and eyes and face. It was a nice grin, full of mischief. Fitting for his lost star. “I know.”

Sam took a few steps in, watching Gabriel test the restraints of the scar tissue still forming beneath his gash. He stopped at the edge of the bed, stared at the ground. “You can live with him, you know.”

“Who?”

“Castiel,” Sam said. “If he makes you more comfortable. I heard you talking, actually talking to him earlier.”

Gabriel froze. “Did you hear what we said?”

Sam shook his head. “No.”

Gabriel and Sam both fell silent, Sam grieving for everything he thought this might become after Gabriel fell. But if Castiel made him comfortable, if he could talk to Cas, then he should go live with him. It would be better for his mental health to be around someone he could talk to. Work through his grief with. Learn how to be a human.

“It’s okay to go is all I’m saying. You don’t have to stay with me just because I found you.”

“Okay,” Gabriel said. Sam waited but he made no move to leave. “I’ll think about it.”

Sam went to waiting for the moment Gabriel would speak up. To say he was leaving. Sam hardly slept that night.

In the morning, Sam awoke to Gabriel packing up the things he’d gathered in his short time here. His favorite mug, the sweater a soft yellow he’d taken to wearing on colder nights.

Sam sat up, watched him gather his things, wincing each time he bent to pick something else up. There was no sign of Castiel, but Sam figured that’s where he’d be going. It made sense. It would be better for him in the end. Better, too, for Sam to get some distance. Then he wouldn’t get so attached.

Sam laid back down, turning his back to Gabriel and the door, listening to him move. He followed the footsteps to the door, but then there was a silence where the hinges should have been. Sam froze, frowning. Gabriel’s voice almost startled him into jumping, into revealing he was wide awake. Gabriel probably knew anyhow because then he started to speak.

“It hurts too much to see them shine. Hurts too much to see the way I hurt you,” Gabriel said. Then there was the hinges squeaking, the door open and shut again.

All Sam heard was I’m leaving you, and he knew it wasn’t fair after he left Gabriel alone in the sky, but it hurt nonetheless.

Dean came into the room not long after, hovering at the edge of his bed, hand reaching out to brush Sam’s shoulder. “Heard he moved out.”

Sam shrugged, staring out the empty window. “He left me.”

“He’s just trying to sort his head out. We all do it differently.”

Sam turned over, Dean still sitting on his bed. “So, he moved in with you guys?”

“Huh?” Dean asked.

“I heard him talking to Cas. Actually talking to him. I thought he would have chosen him to live with over me.”

“No,” Dean said. “He moved into that place down the road with all the vines growing up the walls. Didn’t say a word to me and Cas, just nodded to us in the garage as he walked by. We watched him tear the vines that blocked the front door with his hands.”

Sam hadn’t been in that house yet. Thought the vines were a sign to keep on moving. Before, he couldn’t stomach the idea of having left something dead after it had been alive before he touched it. Now all he cared about was the star, unconvinced he was still so alive, locked inside. Sam could not go to him. He had asked for space, loud and clear. “Still,” Sam said. “He left me.”

“He just moved down the street, drama queen,” Dean snorted. He patted Sam’s shoulder, tugged at his sleeve. “Up we get. It’s afternoon and we’re making another library run without that whole disappearing act this time.”

“Fine,” Sam said, dragging himself from the bed. Everything felt so very heavy. His hands, his heart. “First, help me get his mattress out of here,” he said, gesturing to the one Gabriel had left ruffled and stained red.

“Don’t you want to keep the big one-”

Sam shook his head, cutting Dean off with one look. It was Gabriel’s. He could not sleep in it anymore. Dean helped him move the mattress to the street where he hesitated, moving backwards on his heels. “Now where?”

“Now, we knock on our new neighbor’s door.”

Dean shrugged and let Sam lead the way. At the door, Sam set his side of the mattress down and stood where the vines shriveled. The door was green beneath, peeling and splintered, but the handle was gleaming and the peephole intact. All in all it made it through fairly unscathed, whatever had happened here.

He raised his fist to knock and then let it fall at his side. What was he doing, but showing his grief to a man already grieving? There was no point to this show he was creating. He walked back down the driveway to Dean.

“What the hell man, did you even knock?”

“No,” Sam said.

“So what are we doing with the damn thing?”

“We take it back,” Sam said. “He doesn’t need to see me grieve, too.”

That shut Dean up and they carried it back into Sam’s place with only mild taunting from Cas who had watched them walk both ways from their doorway above the garage.

They shoved the mattresses against the far wall and Sam realized just how much he missed the open space, the open air, the room to dance. He had said goodbye to Gabriel, had said hello too, but still he itched to dance and he knew now it wasn’t just for Gabriel. It hadn’t ever been.

Sam tagged along with Dean and Cas to the library, searching through astronomy books but finding nothing useful for those that used to be stars. Flipping through the pages, he learned nothing but just how beautiful the humans used to think him. How he thought about the stars now. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be sketched with such detail and depth as he had as a star. On one page, he saw his name, gleaming and glossy across the top. He shut the book. That was dead, all that gloss and shine. He was just Sam now.

“What’s wrong?” Castiel asked, coming up from the other end of the aisle with a stack of books. He looked from Sam’s face, hardened, to the book in his hands and bent to set his books on the ground. He pulled the book from Sam’s hands despite Sam’s protesting. “Don’t. Don’t look.”

Cas flipped through the book until he landed on his own name. His fingers traced the letters. “You think I’ve been here decades and haven’t wondered what they made of me? I have traced these letters thousands of times before they were ever put on paper by my own hand.”

“Why did you keep it?” Sam asked. “You star name?”

“It’s who I am, fallen or not. Others feel differently when they fall, a rebirth. It’s up to you.”

“Do you think Gabriel will keep his?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know how he’s feeling,” Castiel said. “He’s the only one that can decide what he ends up making of this life down here.”

“I think he might leave,” Sam whispered.

Castiel nodded. “It’s hard to be the one left behind. Hard to do the leaving too. Sometimes leaving is the only way to figure out if you want to come back. If you can.”

Sam sank to the ground against the bookcase, hands empty and wanting. He was lost again, even when he had thought he’d found everything. If Gabriel left, what would he be?

“You won’t be alone. I don’t see myself leaving anytime soon,” Cas said, looking at Dean through the shelves to where he was bent over a pile of old newspapers sealed in plastic. He looked up, caught Cas’s eye, grinned.

Cas grinned back, that veiny glow snaking up his arms beneath his sweater and up his neck. He turned to Sam. “Sometimes, it takes awhile. Give him time. Give him space. Give him your love.”

“How can I, if he wants nothing to do with me?”

“It’s not you,” Cas said, patting Sam on the shoulder. “He has lost everything. You already. The sky now. It’s hard to convince yourself you won’t lose it again.”

“What can I do?” Sam asked.

“Just be there,” Cas said. Dean called him over from a newspaper. Cas squeezed Sam’s shoulder before moving to check out what Dean had found. “Take care of yourself. He may have been a star, but you were once one too.”

Sam stayed, sitting on the floor of the library while Dean and Cas whispered overtop the newspapers, seeking out the reason why the town had been abandoned, and for long enough that life had circled back again.

Gabriel didn’t emerge from his house, at least when Sam could see, all day. Sam went home and slept beneath the stars, room echo-empty when it used to be so full of the sound of Gabriel’s breathing. He crawled into the bed Gabriel had been sleeping in and found the lingering smell of space and blood left in the sheets.

Gabriel did not come out the next day either. Sam spent it in the river until his skin pruned. He tested his lungs, pushing them to the brink. To the point when his chest began to beg. To burn. He’d wait longer still. Then, he let his feet hit the floor, moving to the light.

At the end of the day when yet again Sam finally came up for air and found Cas sitting at the side of the river, eyes tense and trained on the water. “Cas?” Sam called.  

“I came to see if you wanted to have dinner at our place tonight. Dean’s making spaghetti.”

Sam knew it would do him good not to be alone. He nodded, and Cas waited as he waded from the water, worried eyes watching all the while.

Dean and Cas chattered about the old newspapers, about people who had once lived where they ate their dinner. Sam listened, but nothing seeped through to stay. They had not found out why everyone left, but the most recent newspaper was decades ago. Out the window, the fog hung thick in the moonlight.

Sam ate quickly and excused himself from the table, fleeing to his home as the stars awoke above. He itched to dance, itched to let out this cloud overhanging his chest. He was sad, and lost. Dancing would help him find his way back.

With the mattresses out of the way, there was plenty of room to stretch, to kick off his boots, to stand and twist beneath the stars. This is what you made me, he said as he curled his body into the smallest thing in the room. On the floor, he covered his face and danced against the darkness. This is how it feels to fall alone.

He slowly danced himself from the floor, put the pieces of his body back together, stood on legs he now knew were his. He was no longer reaching for the sky, but dancing beneath it, a backdrop to his pain. That’s where he came from, the hole in the ceiling the same one in his soul. He couldn’t find his way back.

But he’d claim this body, claim this land he’d chosen. Even if Gabriel did not choose him back, he’d have this place, this body, this love. He’d have enough, he realized, to dance alone for the rest of his life and only ache a little each day.

A breath hitched at his back and Sam turned slowly, finding Gabriel in the doorway, watching wide eyed. Sam dropped his arms where they’d been tangled towards the sky, and, chest heaving, wiped the sweat from his face.

“Remember how we used to dance?” he asked Gabriel after he remained in the doorway, unmoving. It was a cry for an acknowledgement of what they once were and Sam stared, watching for any sign of recognition beneath Gabriel’s eyes.

Gabriel nodded once and Sam’s sigh flooded the room. He had acknowledged what they once were, there was nothing more Sam could ask for. Not today.

Sam bent to pick up a towel from the floor to wipe his face, and when he stood, Gabriel was gone again. Had he been in the doorway at all?

The smell of space lingered, that was the only sign it had been real. Sam clung to it, to the doorway with his fingertips, and replayed Gabriel’s nod over and over again. He remembered their dancing. He had seen Sam dance as a human. Had he known what Sam was thinking? About how alone he was feeling?

Sam wasn’t sure anyone that cared about him would have left if they had known that's what he’d been thinking. He wasn’t sure Gabriel cared about him, though. Not since the fall. Not since he left Gabriel stranded in the sky for something he had no idea he did.

When he caught his breath, Sam rummaged through his backpack to find the shirt he wanted to sleep in. An envelope fell out. It was the tickets to the ballet in two days time. He had forgotten all about them in the mess Gabriel had made of the life he was living now.

The look on Gabriel’s face when he fled Sam’s doorway, his plea to be alone the other day, all of it went flashing through Sam’s mind. He wanted space. Sam would give him more than he asked for. It was the least he could do for Gabriel who had saved him, Gabriel whom he’d left behind.

He packed his bags, left a note on his bed for Dean or Cas to find. He was going to the ballet with Jody two states away. He’d be home sometime. Don’t go looking for him.

The Impala probably woke up Dean when he started it, keys turning twice in the ignition before it caught. That was fine, he’d be long gone before Dean made it down the stairs. He was slow to wake, Dean, now that they’d found a home. It would take his brain a minute to catch up.

Sam pressed the pedal to the floor and took off, tracing the path on a map he’d found in the gas station on the edge of town all the way to the theatre. From a house down the street, he’d borrowed a suit wrapped in plastic. It would be too short on his ankles, but he couldn’t waste time trying to find something his size. He’d make do with what he had.

The drive was smooth, slower when he got close enough to the theatre that he had to find a place to stay overnight. When he slid beneath the sheets of the hotel room he’d found, he thought about Gabriel and how he’d probably love to be driving along these rivers. He shook his head and shut out the light. Gabriel wanted to be alone, Sam would listen to his wishes even in his thoughts. It would be good practice for when Gabriel decided to leave for good. Sam knew it was coming, he could feel it since he picked Gabriel up from the crater. There was a distance between them, further than the stars had ever been from Earth. He couldn’t cross that before, how could he possibly cross it now?

In the morning, Sam found a little place tucked into crumbling brick and he ordered breakfast from a waitress with dead eyes. If she had once been a star, she had lost the look of it. He knew it was possible. It would have broken his heart to know that’s what had become of a star fallen, dead on the inside and the out.

He ate by the window, facing the theatre, and watched for any sign of Jody passing by. The ballet didn’t start for hours, he knew his chances were slim. But, each time a woman around her height passed by, he couldn’t help leaning forward to look closer.

He was in a foreign place. He was left alone to wander. In this city, he found tiny places he could see come to life in his own town. On the corner, a farmer’s market sprung up before his eyes while his breakfast grew cold beneath his hands. People came and went from a card shop, a bookstore, a laundromat. But, the little girl in a tutu caught his eye as she made her way, hand clutching her father’s, into the studio connected to the theatre.

Sam left money on the counter, far too much, and made his way to follow them. He wasn’t sure they’d let him in, wasn’t sure what he’d do once he got there. He went anyway and with his hand on the door, he began to question what he was doing. He’d just go back to his hotel to wait.

“Hi, you here for the open studio? We’ve got a whole room empty still,” a woman pulled open the door and gestured Sam inside. “Don’t think many people got the flyers this week so it’s pretty dead.”

“It’s open for anyone?”

“Sure is,” she said, leading Sam through a dimly lit reception room with plastic chairs the color of muted vomit into a hallway with windows that let him look into pristine studios, wood floors and mirrors surrounding each room. In one, the little girl with the tutu danced to an upbeat, hip hop song while she twirled on her toes. Sam passed her father in the hallway, stopping to watch for a moment. “She’s amazing,” Sam breathed.

Her father smiled and thanked Sam. He was a single father. He was doing his best, he said. Sam clapped him on the shoulder and told him he was doing just fine.

The woman opened the door to a room much bigger than Sam’s was, lights shining, mirrors pristine. “Open until the show starts next door. Holler if you need help filming or with the music.”

“Filming?”

“Most people do audition tapes during open houses like this. Just let me know. I’ve been told I man a mean camera.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sam said, thanking her as she closed the door.

With the door shut and the window turned into a mirror from the inside, Sam knew he could get lost in this place. Knew he would.

It took him longer to fiddle with the music, finding something classic and brimming, than it did to fall in love with the place. The silence. At breakfast, he had felt alone and hated it. Here he was alone and thriving inside of the feeling. The frame around him had changed. Here there was freedom, a closed room of mirrors.

How could he be anything but himself here?

The music began, the world blurred. Sam danced out everything he was feeling, the floors here much smoother beneath his bare feet. He had a pair of baggy sweatpants cinched around his calves, a tank top hanging from his shoulders the color of night. He tossed his backpack by the door and through the open zipper, all the feelings he’d been carrying around came spilling out.

He was weightless, breathless, moving through space as he had as a star, feet hardly touching the ground. He had found a way back to what he’d once been while still in the world he was stuck inside. The best of both, he thought. To be weightless and yet so free.

Time disappeared. It wasn’t until the door opened and the woman tapped against the doorframe that Sam realized any time had passed at all. The music had melted into itself, Sam’s body becoming something fluid.

“Hey, shows starting soon,” the woman said in the doorway. “I’m Ellen by the way.”

“Sam,” Sam said, sitting by his backpack to tuck his shoes back on. He’d have to hurry to get his suit by the sounds of rehearsal drifting from next door.

“Where’d you learn to dance?” Ellen asked. “You got talent, kid.”

Sam shook his head. “Nowhere. Just started recently.”

“Who got you into it?”

Sam sighed. “There was a boy.”

Ellen held up her hand. Her eyes said she understood. That she was sorry. “Say no more.”

“It’s okay. It started for him, with him.”

“Sweetheart, if you’re still dancing then it ain’t for him anymore.”

Sam looked up, thinking maybe she was right. It was for him and him alone, a closed off room from anyone but himself. Sam began to grin.

“Good on you,” Ellen said. “Now get moving or you’ll miss the show.”

Sam hurried to his hotel, threw the suit on over his still-dripping hair from the mediocre hotel shower. He didn’t see Jody as he hurried towards the theatre, but he fiddled with his sleeves anyhow. He wanted her to see what he’d become, something far more human and comfortable than what he’d been at her place.

He looked down, flushing at the exposed ankle from the pants being far too short. He looked up and Jody was standing there, hands in her suit pockets, grinning.

It was two steps until Sam had her wrapped in his arms, her own squeezing him tight around his torso.

“Hey there stranger,” she said when he pulled away, people passing on all sides. He’d managed to keep his glow in check, though he tugged at his sleeves to make sure most of his skin was covered anyway.

“Hey,” Sam said.

“You look better,” she said.

“So do you.” She was smiling through her eyes, face glowing in the most human way. “What gives?”

“You first,” Jody said. She gestured for him to walk inside the theatre and Sam had no idea where to start.

“I found a town. Empty, safe. There’s a room of glass with part of the ceiling missing, I dance inside of it when I feel like it.”

“You started dancing?” Jody asked.

Sam nodded. “Started going to fetch other’s that fall like me. You’d love Dean and Castiel.”

“And?” Jody asked when he trailed off. He could feel his face fall when he thought about how much Gabriel would love her. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“After,” Sam said, shaking his head. “Your turn.”

“I found a family,” Jody said. “Couple of girls needing a home. Claire and Alex. Met a lady, too.”

“Sounds like we’re both in the same boat now,” Sam said, grinning at her. He’d never seen her look so happy.

Their seats were a lush maroon, far richer than anything Sam had back in his home. The lights dimmed and Sam prayed his biggest prayer he wouldn’t glow. Not here. Not now. The ballet started and he was captivated. Awestruck.

Jody grabbed his hand after a little while and he turned to find her just as mesmerized by the way they moved their bodies on the stage. Leaping, twisting. They had none of the rules the rest of them had. Freedom at it’s finest, to know your body enough to make it beautiful.

At intermission, Sam had no words. He wanted to cry. Wanted to shout, to join in on the dance. To feel something like this every day for the rest of his life however long it may be. He had felt like this in the sky, with Gabriel. He had forgotten how much he missed it.

When he thought about how he may never be able to feel like that again, the joy was sucked out of the ballet. The dancers were defying everything he’d never be able to become.

Sam could tell Jody noticed the change in him, her hand tightened in his own. When the show was over, she pulled him from the theatre with stumbling feet to the same diner he’d been at before. They claimed a booth in the back, ducked behind their menus.

“Two coffees,” Jody said when the waitress came to take their order. When she walked away, Jody eyed him over he menu. “What’re you thinking?”

She kept her eyes on the menu and Sam hardly looked up. “I don’t know,” he said, voice breaking. He didn’t know what to do, knowing he’d never be so beautiful again.

Jody flipped the page in her menu. “How about skipping the meal and just getting our coffee to go?”

Sam nodded and Jody waved the waitress over to ask her for to-go cups and the check. She hardly seemed fazed and they were out the door in minutes. Jody didn’t say anything as they wandered through the streets, knowing she was walking beside Sam on the verge of shattering.

They passed a park, swings squeaking in the wind, and she gestured towards them with a raised eyebrow. Sam shrugged and followed her through the sand, sinking onto the swing beside her.

She waited, drifting gently back and forth, waited for Sam to figure out how he’d tell her he’d lost everything beautiful again and again.

“I fell in love when I was skybound. Left him behind when I fell,” Sam whispered. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Jody still, feet digging into the ground. She stared straight ahead, though, and he kept talking. “He fell a little while ago. Week or two. I don’t think he loves me anymore. Not real sure he ever did.”

“Do you still love him?”

Sam nodded. “I was beautiful with him. Everything was.”

How could he tell her Gabriel was the reason he was still alive? How could he explain the way he’d found this town for the two of them to live inside, hoping Gabriel wouldn’t ever arrive while praying one day he might live with Sam inside of it forever.

“Not for nothing, Sam, but you’re beautiful without him. It may not seem so bright and shiny when you’re alone, but the world didn’t lose anything. The sand’s still soft beneath your feet. The sunrise still melts.

“What I’m saying is, fight for him. But, if he doesn’t love you anymore, the world’ll still be beautiful. You’ll be okay.”

“What if I don’t want to live in a world without him?”

“You did. You are. You will,” Jody said. She wrapped her hand around his on the chainlink and squeezed. “You will. Besides, it’s only been a week. He needs time to find himself down here before he can figure out his feelings. World’s crazy enough to navigate without love getting in the way.”

“It’s what kept me alive,” Sam whispered.

“We all cope differently,” Jody replied.

“How will I know when to stop hoping?”

Jody shrugged. She stood from her swing, tugged at Sam’s hand until he was walking alongside her. It was a few minutes of starlit silence before she started to talk in a low voice. “Everyday when my husband would pick my son up from school, I’d sit at the chair closest to the door with a snack in each hand. A granola bar for my husband, peanut butter was his favorite, and green apples sliced up for my son. I knew as soon as I looked away, they’d trade their snacks between the two of them, but still we played this game every day. I’d have just enough time to change out of my uniform and slice the apple before the key in the lock was jiggling.

“The day after the accident, I sat in that damn chair, granola bar and apples clutched in my hands. I slept there for a week straight. Every noise, every shift of the house, I’d jerk awake.

“That’s when it got to hurting too much, hoping for a miracle. For the door to open, their cheeks pink from the cold. They’d gone to Disneyland for a surprise trip. They’d gotten lost on the way home. They’d run away, but missed me too much. Hoping more than hope the police officers had gotten it tangled up. It wasn’t my boys in that car.

“When it hurt so bad to keep sitting in that chair, stalling my entire life for a miracle most of me knew would never come. That’s when I knew it was over, much as it hurt to admit. Throwing that apple away was the best thing I’ve done for the rest of my life,” Jody said. Her voice wavered, but it never broke. “I thought there would never be a world I wanted to live in without them. I’ve had to make do with this one. Does it suck significantly more without them? Sure does. But, I’ve found a family, found the beauty again. You will too.”

She stopped in front of a hotel with glass doors, arm still wrapped around Sam’s. “Want to stay with me? I don’t much like sleeping alone.”

“Sure,” Sam said. He followed her up, showered after her and crawled into bed on top of the sheets. She rolled her eyes, tossed the blanket over his legs when he began to shiver.

“Nothing’s gonna happen except you freezing to death. Night, Sammy.”

“Goodnight, Jody.”

“Hey, I never asked you, what did you think of the ballet?” Jody whispered after turning off the lights.

“It was the most beautiful thing,” Sam whispered, knowing his words weren’t enough.

“That it was,” Jody said. “Think about that when the beauty seems to disappear.”

Sam nodded, and then drifted to sleep. He woke up before the sky was light and wondered when he’d be able to be so full of light like he was as a star again. He used to let it spill until he became the sunrise. Now, he was dark inside all the time.

Maybe humans weren’t meant to shine like that, their world far less dark and distant than the one he’d come from. Maybe it was their stories, their hands, the things they loved that shone the only light they knew how to shine. Sam knew he felt the closest to light when he was dancing. That must be the way to feel like a star again.

He sat against the headboard while Jody slept and watched the sun rise. What could he do to help Gabriel find his light? Right now it seemed staying away was the best thing for him.

“You’re thinking too loud,” Jody murmured. “Go back to bed. Sleep in. You aren’t chained to the sunrise anymore.”

It was true, he didn’t have to be there when the sun arrived. But, he had new eyes. A brain so full of confusion. Sometimes it helped to pretend he was. A time and a place to be every day wasn’t so terrible in this always changing world.

“I can’t stop wanting the sky,” Sam whispered. Gabriel too, though he kept that to himself lest the stars hear and go tattling to Gabriel.

“It’s part of being human, too, if that helps anything. ‘Cept we never get to know how it feels.”

“It feels empty now.”

“That’s called heartbreak,” Jody said. She sat up beside Sam, leaning against the headboard. “Everyone’s got some part of them empty.”

“Part?”

“Yeah. My kitchen’s empty. My ring finger. There are parts of us that feel loss the most.”

“I suppose mine’s my chest. Where there used to be a nebula, there is nothing.”

Jody grabbed his hand on top of the sheets and squeezed it tight in her own. “You’ll be okay. Both of us will. Sometimes it takes being a little empty to know how to make everything else feel full.”

“Like with your new family,” Sam said.

“Sounds to me like I ain’t the only one with a new family between the two of us,” Jody said. The thought made Sam feel much less empty than before. The hole in his chest shrank into itself, small enough to hide between his ribs and disappear unless he breathed just right.

“Come on,” Jody said, swinging her legs into the cool morning air of the hotel room. “Let’s go get donuts.”

They got donuts, each with a goody bag full of more for the drive home. Jody walked Sam to his hotel room and stood with her hands on her hips. “No more doubting yourself. If it works out, great, but if not, you’re great too. You have light enough to make it through without anyone else.”

Sam pulled her into a hug and tried to press as much stardust through his pores. She deserved every inch of it, the thing of stars. She deserved to be a human that knew what it felt like to make it to the sky. “You can tell everyone you’ve touched a star. Changed a star’s life.”

“That’s okay, I think this is something I’d like to keep to myself. A star changed my life too, you know.”

Sam with his crinkling bag of donuts and his far-too-small and wrinkled suit from the night before, felt his eyes water as Jody, ever so human, kissed his cheek and turned on her heel, walking down the carpeted hallway. He watched her go, knowing she was exactly what he needed on this trip. Someone he knew loved him. Someone he loved. It seemed so simple, it was so grand.

He drove back to his town, munching on donuts until his stomach hurt. He reminded himself as his hands began to tremble that he would be fine. He would be fine. Without Gabriel, he would be fine. If he said it enough, if he repeated it into the car, into the world, it would become true. He’d be fine. The stars heard him say it so he had to be.

The stars said he’d fall if he fell in love. He had fallen. They had not lied.

He saved three donuts in that crinkling bag. He refused to acknowledge the thought of having one left after Cas and Dean took their pick. It would mean an empty house. It would mean vines regrowing where he had begun to get used to them being dead.

The hole beneath his ribs began to grow and Sam stopped thinking about vines and donuts. He’d be in town in an hour. He’d find out then what his fate would become.


	10. Chapter 10

As Sam pulled up to his studio, he noticed something green and sprouting was sticking from the dirt just outside his door. He had not planted anything, but the sign of life had him breathing a bit easier. Around Gabriel’s door, he couldn't help looking, the vines he’d cut had begun to regrow around the frame, strong and green. Though the town was abandoned, life still threaded the soil. They had found a thriving place to cope with their own destruction. Perhaps surrounding themselves in this town, growing through whatever disaster had occurred, it would seep beneath their skin and they would learn to thrive too.

He turned his headlights off, for the dark of the night made him worried he would wake someone up with the light. He parked near Dean’s place and made his way softly to his own home freezing when the light from the glass registered. The green thing in the doorway forgotten, Sam peered in the doorway to find movement through the glass. Had they taken over his room already, thinking he wouldn’t return?

Light came from Dean’s house above the garage, a good sign, but Sam’s heart was already racing.

He kept as still as possible through the door, stopping to listen. He could hear music, the kind Sam loved to play. Classic, soft, flooded with the feeling of where they had once called home. Haunting and soft. Had this been another situation, Sam would have begun to dance.

Instead, he crept closer, peering through the glass as he pressed his body against one of the wood frames around the window. Inside, golden lit and glowing, was Gabriel, twirling in the center of the room. The panic in his heart melted away. Sam was mesmerized by the way Gabriel seemed so comfortable in this body he’d wound up in, so in control and fluid. He tipped onto his bare heel, turning, a silent orbit around a world of his own.

His face was soft, eyes closed and tilted up towards the hole in the sky. Sam wondered how he got the lights in the rafters to work. He hadn’t been able to get them to work so far and he’d only been gone two days.

Watching him, Sam could feel Gabriel’s heart beating in the center of the room. Could feel the pain radiating, the loss, the searching. Part of him wanted to step forward, join the dance, show him he wasn’t alone in this suffering. But, he knew Gabriel needed to be alone in this. Had asked to be alone in this. He’d drown in his sorrow and never reach a hand out for help. Sam had to be okay with that, as much as it hurt to stand on the shore and watch him fight for air. It was part of learning to swim, this world an ocean as much as the last was starlight.

Sam’s heart leaped in his chest anyhow, a star reaching for another across space. He began to glow softly and Gabriel inside stopped mid-spin all the light falling away.

It hadn’t been lightbulbs flooding the glass. It had been Gabriel and Gabriel alone. His pain was strong enough to fill the night. Sam’s heart broke as the light disappeared.

It had been his hair, his eyes, the curve of his grin that had been alight, glowing. He held gold in all of his features.

Gabriel walked towards the door slow and Sam hesitated, mind tugging him back to the car, back to Jody, somewhere he wouldn’t have to face Gabriel and his uncaringness. The door swung open, though, and Sam was rooted.

Gabriel held the handle in his hand, looked at Sam with a tilted head.

“Sorry,” Sam said. “I saw the light and thought maybe something had happened.”

Gabriel leaned against the doorway with his hip, sweat dripping down his neck, down the glimpse of collarbone Sam could see from beneath a gray t-shirt Sam swore he’d wore himself not a week before. “Why the hell didn’t you get back in that car and go, then?”

“Couldn’t leave you guys stranded,” Sam said, catching Gabriel’s flittering grin across the darkness. Sam thought he’d like to see that again, wouldn’t mind seeing it every day from now until the whole sky fell.

“Promise me something?” Gabriel said, soft.

“If you promise me something too.”

“Fair enough. Promise, if it comes to it, you’ll save yourself.”

“Why?” Sam whispered, regretting the word as it slipped through his lips.

Gabriel was silent, confusion across his eyes. They fell to the ground, his lips turning down. He shook his head. “Just, promise me, okay?”

“Okay,” Sam said. He didn’t know what Gabriel wanted from him, didn’t know what right Gabe had to ask Sam to leave him behind after it had hurt so badly the first time.

“Your turn,” Gabriel said. He had yet to look up from the dirt where the seeds had sprouted.

“Promise you’ll shine like that, often as possible. Doesn’t matter why, or where, or for whom. Just shine.”

Gabriel jerked up, stunned. Sam blushed, cheeks glowing in the night beneath his eyes. He scratched his neck. “I’m going to go grab some food at the grocery. Stay as long as you want.”

“Sam,” Gabriel called as Sam turned to go. He stopped, waiting. “Where’d you go?”

“The ballet. Figured I’d give you some space,” Sam said. He began to walk to the place that had once been a grocery store, world full of night, the imprint of Gabriel’s light behind his eyelids all the while. They’d started to store food there, anything they could find that was still good.

In the store, Sam’s heart full of something closer to hope, he grabbed a handful of chocolate bars he’d seen Gabriel reaching for once before. They’d share them in Sam’s glass room and he’d find that smile Gabriel shared with him before.

He was halfway there and the light from his room was absent. Hope drowning, he carried himself to the door to find his room empty of Gabriel and any sign of him. Sam turned from his glass walls, fearing they’d shatter against the sound of his heart, and moved from his doorway towards Gabriel’s vine-framed door.

“Sammy?” For one moment, Sam got to believe it was Gabriel. Pretend he hadn’t heard the door above the garage open, hadn’t seen the movement, lost inside his own head. But, the voice was wrong and Sam’s fantasy collapsed. He turned to Dean standing at the top of the stairs. “When did you get back?”

“Just now. Went to the store to grab a bite. I was starving.”

Dean jogged down the stairs, meeting Sam in the middle of the street. He nodded at Gabriel’s door where Sam had been staring. “Haven’t seen him since you took off. Where’d you go anyhow?”

“Met up with Jody, the one that took me inl.”

“How was it?” Dean asked, moving to his car. With every streak of dirt, he rubbed at it, searching for damage. Sam rolled his eyes.

“Good. Brought you back a treat,” Sam said, remembering the plastic bag sitting on the passenger seat. He grabbed it and shut the door softly despite knowing everyone was still awake. Part of him didn’t want Gabriel to know he was still outside, still moving through the night. Part of him didn’t want to remind Gabriel he existed at all.

“Sweet. Bring it up, Cas’s making burgers and homemade fries. He’d love to hear about Jody.”

“Sure,” Sam said, thinking of his empty room and the light that was there not twenty minutes ago. “Be there in a sec.”

He watched Dean bound up the stairs, call into Cas to set another plate once he got inside the door. It clicked shut and Sam moved to Gabriel’s door again. He knelt, leaving the chocolate bars on his porch mat, a tattered, brown fabric square with the word “welcome” stitched in a thread that used to be white years and years ago.

He knocked on the door twice, quick raps, and then made his way to Dean’s place at a far-too-quick pace. He didn’t want to be there when Gabriel opened the door. He was halfway up the steps when he heard the door click at his back. Sam didn’t turn around. Just went into Dean’s place and shut the door behind him.

Inside, he found new furniture dotting the place. A couch from the apartment above the diner at the edge of the trees, the sink faucet from what used to be a clothing store’s bathroom. It struck Sam, then, the water stains from Dean’s sweating cup, the ball of socks by the couch. This had become a home overnight. An actual home. Sam thought about his glass room and didn’t like the idea of cluttering it. Maybe he needed to reconsider where he laid his roots. There’d be no sign of him left behind this Earth where he chose to live now. That had been the point, every intention to get back to the sky. Now, though, now he’d have to reconsider.

This is what he wanted, Dean kissing Cas’s cheek at the stove, plates laid out on the chipped table. He wanted dancing, too, but that didn’t mean he had to live somewhere that felt cold and foreign most days. Couldn’t he have both?

“What’d you bring?” Dean asked, eyeing the bag in Sam’s hands.

“Donuts,” Sam said and the word wasn’t yet out of his mouth by the time Dean had snagged the bag. Cas swatted at his hands, complaining about how dinner was going to be ready in a few minutes. Dean just grinned at Cas, mouth full of frosted, sprinkled dough and thrust one into Cas’s hands. Despite his protesting, Cas’s donut was gone in an instant too.

“Who’s the third for?” Dean asked, mouth still full.

Sam gestured outside, to Gabriel’s darkened home. Dean shrugged. “If he doesn’t want it, tell him to give it to me.”

“You can have it,” Sam said. Dean eyed him across the room, head tilted. He raised an eyebrow, chewing silent while Cas pretended not to hear at the stove, back going stiff. Sam snapped, “Do you want it or not?”

Dean nodded, stuffing the second donut into his mouth much to Cas’s dismay. Sam sat on the couch, head down. He had been so full of hope. How could it have disappeared so quickly?

“Dean said you went to visit a friend, Sam?” Cas asked, flipping the burgers and letting smoke flood the hood overtop the stove.

“Yeah. When I fell, I was just wandering around. No clothes, no idea where I was. This lady, Jody, approached me. Police officer. She gave me a place to stay. Helped set my dislocated shoulder. She found out what I was and didn’t care one bit.

“When I was with her, I discovered dance on an old TV she dragged up from the basement. When I decided to move on, she bought me two tickets to see Swan Lake. Told me I could take both tickets, no questions asked. I left the second ticket for her. It was only fair for being so kind to me, knowing what I was.”

“I had someone similar, except it was a nurse at a hospital. I meet him for coffee every once in awhile. Catch up.”

“Hell I live with mine,” Dean said, snickering at the eye-roll he earned from both Sam and Cas. After a moment, Dean’s head jerked up. “Cas, you ever seen Sam dance? It’s freaking sweet for something like ballet.”

“I know,” Cas said, scooping the patties onto a plate to carry to the table. “I’ve seen him dance.”

“You let him see you dance? Without all the begging Benny and I had to do?” Dean turned to Sam.

“No,” Cas said. “I stumbled upon it. Only got to see the very end.”

Dean went quiet, Sam too. Sam remembered his goodbye dance that night, remembered how Gabriel fell just a few days after. He had been watching, hadn’t he? Sam at the time had refused to check, but now it was eating at his heart. Was he the reason for Gabriel’s fall? That last goodbye too much for Gabriel to handle?

If that were the case, what would be the reason for his coldness now that he was here?

They ate burgers at the table, Dean talking about heading to the library again early tomorrow to see if they could find anything else about their town. The soil grew flowers and fruit, the walls were still standing. None of them could figure out what it was that chased all the humans away.

“You’re more than welcome to join us,” Cas offered. “Stay over if you’d like. We found more blankets in that pick-up parked in the diner’s lot stuffed beneath the seat. Got new lightbulbs for this place too.”

“Think you could get my lights working?” Sam asked Dean.

“I’ll take a look tomorrow. Can’t be too hard.”

“Just need to find a ladder tall enough,” Sam said. Then he blurted, “I think I might find a new place to stay.”

Dean froze, Cas sending the salt shaker scattering. “New new? Like, leave town new?” Dean asked, voice high.

“No, no. Just a new house,” Sam said. He mumbled, “Mine’s cold now that it’s winter.”

“What about your dancing?” Dean asked, shoulders far more relaxed than before. Cas swiped at the table, clearing as much salt as he could with his hands. Sam stood, grabbing a paper towel dipped it in warm water. When he got to the table, he swiped the salt up with the towel, leaving a wet streak behind.

“I’ll keep it as a studio. Put wooden bars on the walls. It’ll just be for dance now instead of living too.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Cas said, knowing what he did of Sam and why he danced. It was moving on. Healthy. Especially after Gabriel remained so stand-offish in his healing. “We can help you look tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” Sam said. It was a good thing. A move towards the home he wanted. The home he’d been searching for forever. The one he thought he’d found in the stars only when Gabriel was around. That warmth. That light. He could find it in something else too. It would just take a little work was all. That’s why everything seemed so disappointing in comparison. He hadn’t put in the work.

Sam slept on Dean and Cas’s couch that night, needing to be around people instead of emptiness. Just for one night. Tomorrow, he’d go back to his empty room and be okay with that. Sometimes he just needed a break from what he was: always, always alone.

In the morning, Sam went back to his place with boxes Dean and Cas had in their closet, and began to pack up his things. He wanted to let them wake up together, without interrupting their breakfast. The shower was running when Sam slipped out the front door. He’d already showered as quietly as possible, threw on his clothes from the day before.

When he got to his room, he started to pack up his things. The clothes he’d managed to find close enough to his size. The stub-ticket from the ballet. He hadn’t much, just three boxes by the time he was done and ready to go. The rest was larger stuff, an end table and his bed, and he’d figure out what to do with those once he chose where he’d be moving.

He was in the middle of folding his t-shirts into the last box when a scuff at the door caught his attention. It was Gabriel in a soft pink t-shirt and black jeans above unlaced boots far too big for his feet.

“You leaving?” Gabriel asked, hovering in the doorway.

“Thinking about it,” Sam said.

Gabriel came closer, kneeling by Sam’s other box of knick knacks he’d gathered. A potted plant struggling to stay upright, a pair of dance shoes worn in and slightly too small for his feet. By slightly he meant they’d fit over his big toe and that’s about it. Still, he kept them. They were a reminder that he wasn’t alone in his love of the art. Someone here once had loved dance too.

Sam kept folding, wondering why Gabriel hung around. He was getting what he wanted, wasn’t he? It meant he could use this place to dance as he liked too.

“Leaving leaving?” Gabriel asked.

“Just a new home for now,” Sam said, shrugging. He wouldn't let himself try to find a Gabriel that cared if he left. Wouldn’t let himself look at all.

“What about this place?”

“It’ll just be a studio. A safe place.”

Gabriel nodded, standing from rummaging through Sam’s box of things. He didn’t say anything, just turned to leave. In the doorway, he paused, boot half out the door. “Don’t.”

Sam froze, t-shirt tangled in his hands. He turned to find Gabriel staring at him, really looking. “Don’t go. Move in with me.”

“What?” Sam whispered.

“If you want, I mean. I’ve got space. And lights. Haven’t gotten the whole heat thing working yet, but that’s supposedly in progress.”

Sam opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Gabriel had asked to be alone. He’d moved out first. Sam had heard him talking about moving out of town, going off on his own to Cas that day. Talking about how it was too hard living here. Who was he to ask Sam to stay?

“Just an offer. Not a proposal or anything. Don’t even need to let me know. There’s a key underneath the vine on the right of the frame, tangled up and hidden. Don’t even lock it most of the time.”

“I’ll let you know,” Sam said.

“Don’t disappear before then.”

“I won’t,” Sam whispered, but Gabe was already gone. Then Cas was at the door and Sam didn’t know how long it had been but his hands were still tangled in his t-shirt.

“Ready to go?” Cas asked.

“Yeah,” Sam shook his head, trying to clear the muddle that had overtaken with Gabriel’s offer. “Yeah, let’s get going.”

“You okay?” Cas asked.

“I think,” Sam started. “I think Gabriel asked me to move in with him.”

“I thought,” Cas started.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Well,” Cas said, falling into step with Sam towards the library. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said.

Cas nodded, kept walking at Sam's side. He didn't say anything, just patted Sam's back gently and they fell into step with Dean. "Why don't we check out houses closer to the outskirts. Haven't scavenged those yet so even if you don't like 'em we might find something good," Dean said.

Sam smiled at him, lost in thought and said it sounded like a good idea. They might find something nice. A new TV, a better shower head, Dean said. They'd make their home a little more comfortable. Sam bit back the jealousy at that feeling of home and looked at the two that had become family. They were a part of home too. They made this place better just by being inside of it.

In the library, Sam avoided the books on stars and poked around through the rest of the shelves. He found one on how to grow plants, one on the technicalities of dance. He grabbed both, stacking them on his arm, and kept searching for something more.

He made his way to the front desk, curious about the old residents. Setting his stack of books down, he sat at the only chair, squeaking through the empty dark wood room, and opened the loans book. It's spine cracked as he flipped the olive green cover open, finding handwritten names scrawled across the chart. Check in, check out, the book names went down in a list of messy scrawl.

"Hey Cas?" Sam called, finding the same kind of books spring up in the last month or so. "Check this out."

Cas came up to the other side of the desk, peering at the chart Sam turned towards him. "The old check out log?"

"Yeah, look at the kind of books they were getting in the last two weeks."

Cas read the titles out loud. "Chemical Plants for Dummies, How to Clean Chemical Spills," Cas kept going, the books on oil ceasing a month prior. "Huh."

"Find anything about an oil company moving in?" Sam asked.

Cas rested his elbows on the desk, reading closer at the chart. "No. At least we've got some sort of timeframe to work with. Dean?"

"Cas?" Dean called from the tables in the back.

"Start looking about three weeks before the most recent paper. Looking for anything about oil or chemicals."

"Oil?" Dean asked.

"Yeah, we've got some sort of lead up here. Is it okay if I take this?" Cas asked, sliding the log from the table. Sam nodded, watched Cas walk back to try to figure out the secrets of their town.

Sam began to flip through the book on dance behind the desk, waiting for Dean and Cas to get tired and want to go back into the light. The library was beautiful, carved wood across each archway and deep maroon accents all around. On the front desk there was a hand-carved eagle, tall and proud, perched and waiting.

It was beautiful. Nothing this stunning ever lasted. Not the people with their messy handwriting. Not the stars in their shining. He liked beautiful things, but they made him sad. He wanted to go back outside where he didn't have to think about the people that had once come here, kids in hand, to check out the book with the crocodile on the cover to teach them about the alphabet.

It was long into the afternoon, Sam's first dance book finished and a second one grabbed to take back to his room, by the time Cas and Dean gave up for the day.

"Ready to go check out some places?" Dean asked. Cas held his hand as they made their way down the stairs.

"Lead the way," Sam said, leaving the books on the front table. He'd grab them when they came back. There was no use in carrying them around the outskirts today.

"Think we'll start with that two story near the grocery store," Dean said.

"Don't forget the one-story near the river with the plot of land in the back," Castiel said. "Lots of windows in that one."

"Sounds good," Sam said, following behind. Gabriel waved at Sam from his doorstep as they passed. Sam gestured to him to follow along, to join in, to engage, but he shook his head.

Sam had never been more confused. Gabriel turned, pruning at the vines snaking up his doorway. It seemed overnight they had overtaken his door again. Perhaps life here was more than just regrowth, perhaps it had begun thriving.

The first house, two stories and sparse, was far too large for Sam to live inside. He’d drown in the empty space and the silence. Dean found an AC/DC poster above a bed in a small room and rolled it up, tucking it into his back pocket to carry back home. Cas rolled his eyes, muttering about how that wouldn't be in their bedroom. Dean snorted and agreed to put it in his garage if that would make Cas happy.

“It would,” Cas said and kissed Dean soft as Sam made his way down the stairs. Sam had found some jeans that looked like they’d fit better than the ones falling from his hips and far too long for him. On the nightstand of a different bedroom, he found a stack of CDs and without looking, he grabbed them all. In the closet, stuffed with clothes, he swiped a backpack and tossed his finds inside. He figured they might be needing it today.

Cas had bandages clutched in hand and Dean had a few trinkets beyond his poster. A salt shaker, a coffee mug with the words “morning sunshine” etched onto the side. He gave it to Cas with a cheesy grin and Sam hid his smile. For a guy so gruff, he melted beside Castiel.

“I’ll carry your stuff,” Sam offered, holding out the backpack.

“How do you like this place?” Dean asked. “Probably should have asked before we ransacked it.”

Sam shook his head. “Too much empty space.”

It reminded him of the parts of space he didn’t like. The darkness, the empty hours with no one in sight. It was glimpses from his birth, floating through the emptiness, pulling by things far larger than himself. He didn’t want to be that alone again.

“Got everything you need?” Cas asked.

Sam nodded, Dean too. “Bunch of clothes upstairs, though. Keep that in mind if you need something in the future.”

“Posters too,” Dean grinned. Cas hit his arm and they started for the second house on the agenda.

As they walked, they passed another smaller house, closer to the river. “Let’s go in,” Cas said.

There were plants sprouting from pots beside the door and mail stuck out from the mailbox on the driveway. They hadn’t found mail still inside the box like that before. On side tables, sure, but all the mailboxes in the center of town were empty.Must have left in more of a haste than the rest.

Dean set about getting into the house, while Sam flipped through the mail. There was a gossip magazine he’d seen across the few gas stations he’d been inside, a bill for the electric long overdue. The last magazine he tucked into his backpack, stunned by the image on the front. The body issue of a sports magazine. Everyone he’d glanced at was stunning, powerful. He wondered if anyone that did ballet was inside, wondered if their bodies looked as beautiful as the man on the front.

He followed Dean and Cas inside to find the place full of boxes towering to the ceiling. “Whoa,” Sam said.

“I know right?” Dean said. “This’ll take days.”

“Pick two boxes for this afternoon. Then we go see the next house,” Cas said. Words were scrawled across some of them, crossed out and scribbled over. Whoever lived here had collected so many things, moved them across the country time and time again. It was a wonder they had to leave it all behind.

Sam wandered through the house, reading the scrawl. _Vintage books_ , read one in black sharpie, overtop the word kitchen in red crayon. Another read _books that make me happy_. He grabbed one that read notebooks from the closet in the living room. For his second, he grabbed a box that said _for when winter comes_ thinking they’d be good to have around as the nights grew colder and colder.

He sat on the floor beside Cas going through a box of bathroom supplies and Dean spreading tools out atop the carpet.

“I don’t think I’ll be living here,” Sam muttered. Dean snickered across the floor. He knew he’d be bringing the winter clothes closer to town, so he didn’t bother sorting through it. Inside the box of notebooks, he found piles and piles of scribbles. The first was full of dreams. The second, the pain-stained pages after the person’s dreams failed. In the margins of one, there were sketches of stars beside notes from a science class, in scrawl he could hardly bother to make out.

The older ones he was drawn to, wondering how a person could bounce back after his first dreams had died. Throughout, there were personal segments between planning, sketches of a business and then a dress.

_I am getting closer. The air here smells like what I had always dreamed._

On the next page, a sketch of the house they stood inside filled the page. If this is where they’d found their goal, why had they abandoned everything? Based on these notebooks, Sam thought, whoever had owned them would be able to recover. To dream again. He hoped so.

On one page of a notebook far older, it was full of the phrase _I will learn to reach again_. Sam tore it from the notebook and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans. The rest he left behind. He did not need someone long gone to weigh him down, as much as he felt they had shared lives with a similar melody.

Cas tucked handfuls of stuff into Sam’s backpack and went back to search through a second box. Dean shrugged and threw his tools back in, grabbing the whole thing and shuffling it to the door. He moved into the hallway, head titled, to read the scrawl on the stacks. Sam shrugged, opening the box for winter, far lighter than he’d thought it would be.

Inside, there was a layer of small packets and nothing much else. Sam frowned, reaching in to pluck a packet from the top. It was seeds, sunflower seeds. It had not been a seasonal winter the person had been talking about. Sam shrugged, throwing the seeds by the handful into his backpack. They’d need them eventually and he thought he saw vegetables scattered through the group. Fresh food wouldn’t hurt to have around.

“I could look through this place all day,” Dean called from the kitchen.

“We’ll have to come back,” Cas said. “Everyone got what they needed for today?”

Sam nodded, Dean picking up his box of tools now weighed down by kitchen supplies too. Cas had pillows tucked under his arm and out the door they went.

“Why don’t you guys take the stuff back and then meet me at the river house?” Sam offered. Dean’s box was heavy and he didn’t want Cas to drop the pillows into the dirt.

“Sure. I’ll take the backpack if you want,” Castiel offered. Sam shrugged it off his shoulders and headed towards the river. “Just put it inside the door.”

As he made his way to the house by the river, movement caught Sam’s eye. It was through the trees, someone kneeling. Sam stepped forward, leaning in. It was Gabriel, that much he could see. Pink t-shirt, black jeans from that morning. He was curled towards the ground. On first glance, Sam would’ve thought he was praying. As he stood there, he noticed Gabriel’s arms moving, swirling in the dirt, the muscles of his back rippling with his movements.

“Gabe?” Sam called through the trees. Sam did not want to startle him. He jerked up, turning towards Sam. His arms were coated in dirt. Sam could see a patch of dirt where his hands had been, fresh and tilled for planting.

A flash of green. Sam remembered the sprout outside his own door.

“You’re the one that planted something outside my door while I was gone aren’t you?” Sam asked.

Gabriel nodded, going slightly pink.

“What did you plant?”

Gabriel flinched. “Orchids. Funeral orchids.”

Sam didn’t know what it meant or why he blushed as he said it. “Do they mean something?” Sam asked.

Gabriel shrugged. “I thought you were leaving for good.”

Sam shrugged. “Just checking out some other homes. The glass is a little exposed.”

“I don’t know, I like being able to watch you change,” Gabriel said. It startled a laugh out of Sam, a blush too and he scrambled for something to fill the silence.

“What are you planting?” Sam asked.

“Not sure yet. Feels good to connect though. Sometimes I still feel like I’m in space.”

“Me too. You ever wanted to feel like Saturn?” Sam asked.

“If he moved faster maybe, that fat bastard.”

“Of course that’s what you’d say,” Sam said laughing. “Want to check out this house with me? Tell me all the things you hate about it until I choose to move in with you instead?”

“Sounds like fun,” Gabriel said, brushing his hands off on his jeans. “I’d never turn down a chance to complain.”

“I know,” Sam said, and he lead the way into the house not one hundred feet away.  He slid the back door open with ease, all finger-printed glass. As he stepped in, the wall at his back streamed sunlight into the room from a glass window near the roof, heightened and echoing. Gabriel whistled at his back.

Despite the one-story, the living room had a ladder leading up the wall to Sam’s right and he eyed the small room tucked up there.

“Reckon it’s a bedroom with all the windows,” Gabriel said, following Sam’s eye. “Race you.”

Gabriel was lunging for the ladder, but Sam had arms long enough to catch him by the waist, picking him up and moving him out of the way before he got his hands on the rungs. Gabriel scrambled at his back, using Sam as a ladder to get him on a higher rung.

“Whoa, this place is-” Dean called at the door, stopping when he saw Sam, hands wrapped around Gabriel’s hip bones, both of them frozen with smiles on their faces. “Oh, hey Gabe. What’s up there?”

Sam could see the questions flash across Cas’s face too as he came in. He nodded at him. Sam would tell him later.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Sam said. Gabriel scrambled up the rungs, disappearing for a moment before poking his head back out.

“I was right. Whole thing’s a bed,” Gabriel said. Sam moved to join him, Dean and Cas disappearing through the hallway to check out the other bedrooms and bathroom. When he got to the top, he found the bed silhouetted in sunshine, the elevated window aligned with the bed.

“Bet you the sunrise is a bitch,” Gabriel muttered. It was high enough for Sam to sit, but he hadn’t much room beyond that.

“Not one for early hours?” Sam asked. In the sky, he hadn’t been one for being awake much at all.

“Hell no,” Gabriel said.

“Not even after losing the stars?” Sam asked. It was the first time he’d acknowledged what they’d lost to Gabriel. He flinched, wondering if he’d overstepped.

Gabriel turned to the window and shook his head. “No. I still like living under the stars. They are beautiful. We used to be.”

“We definitely were,” Sam said. The walls of the bedroom had small inlet shelves on each wall, an alarm clock tucked into one, a glass of water in another. “How long do you think that’s been there?”

“Dare me to drink it?” Gabriel asked.

“No,” Sam said. “That can’t be healthy in the least.”

Gabriel grinned at Sam and moved to grab the glass. Sam called down to Cas, praying he was close enough to hear him. “Hey Cas, what kind of dangers are there for drinking water that’s been sitting out for years?”

“Is it in plastic?” Cas asked. By now, Gabriel had the glass in his hand and he was crawling close to Sam, a gleam in his eye.

“No,” Gabriel called.

“Beyond tasting off because of the pH it shouldn't do anything detrimental. Why?”

“No reason,” Sam hissed at Gabriel, reaching for the glass and failing to grab it. “Don’t. Seriously, don’t.”

“Or what?” Gabriel asked, moving the glass to his lips.

“I won’t give you the packets of seeds I found in that hoarders house on the outskirts of town.”

“Seeds?” Gabriel froze. “What kind?”

“Sunflowers, some veggies. I didn’t look at all of them. They’re in my backpack in my room.”

“Deal,” Gabriel said, setting the glass back down again.

Sam shook his head. “You have to promise me something though.”

“You and your promises,” Gabriel sighed.

“You can’t plant the sunflowers until winter.”

“Winter? Sam, it’s too cold for them to grow in that kind of weather.”

“Not that. Winter in your heart. When not even the sun feels warm anymore.”

“Where were those a few days ago when I thought you left?” Gabriel muttered. He froze, realizing he’d said it out loud. Sam’s heart sank. He thought Gabriel hadn’t noticed. Hadn’t cared. In front of Sam’s eyes, he could see the mask be pulled back over Gabriel’s face.

“You got yourself a deal,” Gabriel said. He began to climb down the stairs. “Let’s check out the rest of this place.”

“You haven’t found anything to complain about yet,” Sam snorted after they’d gone through the kitchen with stainless steel appliances and the spare bedroom with a pristine dark-wood desk tucked against a window.

“No, I guess I haven’t,” Gabriel said. “Guess I can’t tell you not to move in here.”

“You can still, if you want,” Sam said. “Tell me not to live here.”

Cas and Dean came up to the pair of them as Gabriel opened his mouth.

“You up for dinner?” Dean asked, eyeing Sam. “Cas is dying to make some pasta dish but it’s far too much food for the two of us.”

“I believe this is where I make myself disappear,” Gabriel said, moving for the door.

“You’re invited too,” Cas called softly. Gabriel was already gone. Sam sighed. Sometimes, it felt like he hadn’t gained any ground with him at all. He still wasn’t sure Gabriel would stick around this town once a car was available. Dean would have one running soon. They should have at least two in town in case they needed one when Sam was gone fetching fallen stars.

“I’m out too,” Sam sighed. “But can I ask a favor?”

“Sure,” Dean shrugged.

“Can you get hot water in Gabriel’s place?”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “I think I can manage that. I’ll get it done tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Sam said.

“What do you think about this place?” Cas asked.

Sam looked around, all the light and air. His voice would echo, but maybe down the line. “This is where I’d like to have a family,” he admitted. He made his way to the door, calling his goodbyes over his shoulder to hide his blush. Something about Gabriel always made talking about him feel like he was holding his own heart as he did it.

Sam went back to his place and found Gabriel waiting for him at the door. “You can go in, you know,” Sam said.

Gabriel shrugged. “Feels weird to without you here.”

“Fair enough. Got Dean to promise to hook you up with hot water,” Sam said. “He’s coming by tomorrow.”

“So what you’re telling me is to not answer the door naked?” Gabriel asked.

Sam snorted and opened the door, Gabriel following behind. From the backpack, Sam pulled the packets of seeds out onto the floor and Gabriel sat, cross-legged in front of him to sort through them.

“Hey, what are you calling this place?” Gabriel asked, packet of tomato seeds in hand.

“I was thinking Starlight, but that’s too cheesy,” Sam said. He could feel the blush crawling up his neck. The Town of Starlight. It had been echoing in his head for days.

“No,” Gabriel said. “I like that. A place to go when we’ve lost the sky.”

“Are you staying, then?” Sam blurted. “Sticking around this place?”

“Not sure,” Gabriel said. He stood, gathering the seeds and sticking them into his back pockets. “Thanks.”

He left Sam on the floor, empty space all around. It seemed that’s what he was bound to be left in, time and time again.


	11. Chapter 11

Two days passed, Gabriel’s door shut each time Sam passed. He got his laundry scrubbed, spent hours floating in the water. The first night, he scanned the sky for the first time in a long time, looking for any sign of falling. He saw nothing but stable light and went to bed after with a heart settled. None of his family had fallen. It was a good thing to know.

The third day, though, Gabriel appeared as Sam floated on the water, staring at the blue blanket sky.

“Is this what you meant by feeling like a planet?” Gabriel asked.

Sam sat up, finding him sitting on the riverbank in a yellow long-sleeve shirt and a pair of jeans. “Yeah. You should try it.”

“Maybe another time,” Gabriel said.

“Did you need something?” Sam asked. Gabriel was still sitting there, knees tucked against his chest, chin resting atop them.

“Do you think you could help me with something?”

“Of course,” Sam said. He climbed from the water, drying himself with a towel he left on the rocks they’d dried the mattresses atop all those weeks ago. “What’s up?”

“I want to get the grocery store running again. Or, at least sort of organized but I can’t pick up one of the shelves that crumbled.”

Sam nodded, moving to grab his shirt from near Gabriel’s feet. As he picked it up, he noticed dots of red on Gabriel back.

“Gabe,” Sam said. He moved around to Gabriel’s back, sitting down behind him. “Hold still.”

Sam lifted his shirt slowly, peeling it from the wound that had split back open under strain. “You idiot,” Sam muttered, the whole thing seeping blood. Sam ripped a strip from the t-shirt still in his hands and wrapped it around Gabriel’s torso, tieing it in the front so the knot wouldn’t rub.

“You need Cas to take a look at this,” Sam said. He stood, holding out a hand to help Gabriel up.

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “It’s not so bad. I’ll go when the store is in better shape.”

“Before the day is over,” Sam said.

“Why do you care anyhow,” Gabriel muttered. Sam decided not to comment, letting it sit between them. They walked with distance between them all the way through the streets.

When they got to the grocery store, Sam could understand the blood on Gabriel’s back. The shelves were arranged neatly, now, straight lines clear of everything that had been on them. They were dust-free, too, as was the counter. The products from the shelves were piled in the corner, organized by company and type. Four trash bags sat by the door, full of expired food.

“How you planning on keeping this place restocked?” Sam asked.

Gabriel moved to the shelf that lay on its side in the back near the refrigerator. “I’ve got some phone calls to make.”

“You have a phone?”

Gabe shook his head. “Found a payphone behind the gas station and a few quarters inside my couch. Simple enough.”

“Good to know,” Sam said. “I’ll have to tell the others it’s there.”

Together they got the shelf back upright, though the corner was crumbling and shelves unstable. Sam reckoned he might not need this one with the amount of food sitting by the door to be thrown away, but he didn’t say anything.

Instead, he reminded Gabriel to get his wound checked out while he grabbed the trash bags at the door. He wouldn’t leave them to tempt Gabriel to grab them and do more damage. Sam didn’t know a whole lot about human Gabriel, but he knew he still had that stubbornness from the stars. He would tear his body apart forgetting it wasn’t as sturdy and full of fire now.

That night, a pounding sound began to echo through the streets. Sam tugged on his boots over the baggy sweatpants that cinched around his calves and a sweatshirt of a college he’d never heard of in deep maroon. He followed the pounding through the town, waving Dean back inside when he, too, poked his head out his doorway to investigate. On the very edge of town, Gabriel was hammering at the edges of a sign Sam couldn’t make out from the back. “Gabriel?”

“Heya Sammy,” Gabriel said.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked, rounding the wooden sign and stopping in his tracks. Across the front, hand-painted in white paint, steady and swirling. Welcome to Starlight. Beneath it were the words _where the fallen find a home_. Tears sprung to Sam’s eyes and he couldn’t look at Gabriel who’d stopped hammering to come around to the front beside Sam.

“Fuck,” Gabriel said, looking up at Sam.

“What’s wrong?” Sam asked, voice wavering. Gabriel hadn’t taken his eyes off of him and he tried to hold back the tears while he was looking.

“It’s crooked,” he said, turning now to the sign and the letters.

Sam laughed, sharp and sudden, turning to see the sign perfectly perfect even if the words angled slightly upwards. “No,” he said. “It’s perfect. Thank you.”

“It’s for the seeds. And for dragging my sorry bleeding ass back here.”

They walked back into town together and parted ways at Gabriel’s driveway, Sam glowing softly the whole way. He couldn’t get the image of the sign from his head. Gabriel had even spattered paint across the empty space on the wood, his own creation of starlight.

He went to bed still glowing, wondering if Gabriel could see it from his window. He wanted him to. Wanted him to know how happy the sign had made him.

* * *

From the CDs he’d had grabbed from that other home, Sam found more classical music. He’d found a battery powered stereo at another house, some still-working batteries in the backs of remotes. He was playing something soft and uplifting, dancing in the middle of his room despite the daylight. It was cool enough to let the sunlight touch his skin while he messed around, twirling on his toe until he got dizzy. He went through the motions of lifting his body, training his muscles over and over. He closed his eyes, imagining a partner. It would be someone golden, hips soft beneath his hands, muscle laced and strong.

As he went through the motions, suddenly there was a body beneath his fingers and he froze before lifting them. Was he imagining it, longing hard enough to hallucinate?

He opened his eyes and found Gabriel standing beneath his hands, eyebrow quirked. “You going to lift me or just stand there?”

Sam rolled his eyes, but lifted Gabriel into the air, twirling as Gabriel curved towards the sky. He was beautiful, stunning, shrouded in sunlight. It was just as beautiful as a backdrop of stars. Gabriel more beautiful than both combined.

Gabriel looked down at Sam and the distance of stars had disappeared. Both of them realized it at the same moment. There was nothing keeping them apart, no rules telling them to stay in their place. No one would care if they crossed the distance, just an arm’s length between them.

Sam put Gabriel down, each of them dancing in the opposite direction. He put his heart into it, the realization that they didn’t need to be apart anymore. Gabriel’s dance kept him across the room, moving with each of Sam’s steps backwards and away. Sam lunged, reaching. Gabriel leapt, apart. This is the reason Sam’s heart broke. Each step reassured him the distance wasn’t one Gabriel wanted to cross.

Sam drew his heartbreak into the dance and ended on the floor, breathless and staring at the empty sky. Gabriel joined in, laying beside him and staring up.

“I think this is the best place to hide from God,” he said.

“I don’t think I want to hide. What could he do now that we have fallen?” He turned to see Gabriel, eyes still on the sky.

“I keep forgetting he can’t tell me what to do anymore. I was so used to having to rebel to do what I wanted. Getting pulled into talks, into screaming for hours that only I could hear. I wanted so many things from the sky.”

“What do you want now that you can have anything?” Sam asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “Nothing that I should.”

He stood then, making his way to the door, leaving Sam more confused than ever. Was there a way to make sense of it from the middle? Sam didn’t think so. It was hard enough to make sense of himself.

* * *

A star fell the night after their dance. Sam packed his bags the minute he saw it, tracking it down towards the horizon. He knocked on Cas’s door, asking for medical supplies after he used most of what he had in his backpack on Gabriel when he’d gone to get him.

“Want me to come with?” Cas asked. “You shouldn’t go alone.”

Sam shook his head, thinking the isolation would be good to clear his head away from this town. “I’ll be okay. If I need anything I’ll call the payphone.”

“Grab a burner on your way out,” Cas said. “We’ll be nearby if you need anything.”

“Will do,” Sam said, taking the bags of meds and bandages, travel ice packs and a needle for stitching. He shoved them all into his backpack and made his way back down the stairs.

As he made his way to the Impala sitting on the street, he was hardly paying attention, rummaging through his bag to make sure everything he needed was there. Meds, check. Bandages, check. Granola bars, check.

“What the fuck,” Sam hissed, opening the door of the driver’s side to find someone sitting in the passenger seat.

“Hello to you too,” Gabriel said, unmoved by Sam’s shock. He had a blanket over his legs, long black t-shirt with the outline of a star across the breast pocket stitched in white.

“Nice shirt,” Sam said.

“Stitched it myself,” Gabriel said, rubbing his fingers over the thread on his chest.

“Cute,” Sam said. “That supposed to be you?”

Gabriel crossed his arms and shook his head. “We getting going or what? I brought snacks, in case you were wondering.”

“Why would you want to come?” Sam asked. “You hardly want to be around me most days.”

Gabriel didn’t say anything to that. Sam took it as the truth. He didn’t move to leave, though, so Sam shrugged and started the car. Gabriel shifted in his seat, tucking his legs beneath him.

Sam turned on one of the CDs in the portable stereo he’d found with music a little more modern. He figured the classical wouldn’t keep him awake and he’d been up much of the night gathering supplies, adrenaline racing. He feared the crash he knew would come.

They hit the highway and out of the corner of his eye, Sam could see Gabriel shivering. “You cold?” Sam asked, reaching to turn the heat on.

“Just a little,” Gabriel said, staring out the window. “Have been since I fell.”

“I was for a little while too. Didn't last that long though.”

“We both know I was closer to the sun,” Gabriel snorted. “It’s less being cold and more missing the heat.”

“Did the hot water help?” Sam asked.

“Cas wouldn’t let me try yet. New stitches from the other day.”

“You ripped it open that bad?” Sam asked, squeezing the wheel. He had known it was open again, and he let him help with the shelf anyway. He was partly to blame.

“It’ll heal,” Gabriel said. “Good to know you’re worried about me though. Flattering, really.”

“Shut up,” Sam said.

It got quiet. Sam thought the conversation was over, moved to turn the music up again. Gabriel at his side turned back out the window, arms over his chest.

“I don’t hate you, you know,” he said, soft and quiet. Softer than the wind whipping past the car, it was gone as if it slid from the window. Sam wasn’t sure it had happened at all had Gabriel’s shoulders not looked like the world had fallen atop them and settled in for the duration of eternity. The weight had made a home before Sam could stop it. He didn’t know what to say to get it to leave again.

Sam was going to try. To offer something, a hand to hold up part of the weight.

But, Gabriel was leaning out his window, squinting into the daylight. The smell of space had seeped into the car. Sam didn’t know when that had happened. He’d been too busy watching Gabriel.

With shaking hands, Gabriel pulled on his boots overtop socks bright pink and fluffy. Sam was too sharp, eyes and ears, to comment on them. He would later. After they got the star safe.

For now the socks were just socks to help them walk through the forest. Nothing beyond a side-detail that did not matter. Sam rounded the hood of the car while Gabriel practically fell from the passenger side, legs asleep.

Sam raised his eyebrows, not lingering long on Gabriel but instead on the horizon on all sides. He’d been caught off guard before. He would not let it happen with Gabriel, not with the star out there alone. He would not let it happen to anyone but himself. It was one thing to hear stories, it was another to dream about bathtubs full of his own blood every single night.

They started through the trees, Gabriel falling into step behind Sam. In a line, an echo of their old life, they moved beneath the leaf tops as they showered down orange and brown. There was a rustle, Gabriel’s hand clung to Sam’s. Long after they’d unfrozen, their hands were still linked and Sam shrugged, heart pounding, as he moved forward. Despite the ache in his head, left over from the panic, Gabriel’s tether was soothing.

When the smell of space got overwhelming, Sam found something off. He stopped, straining. What was there, or better yet, what was missing in the air?

“Gabriel,” Sam whispered. “Stay here for a second will you?”

He could tell Gabriel was terrified by the way he didn’t argue, but his fingers wouldn’t easily let go. Sam took his steps slow, searching for the part of the equation that was missing. Another step, and another. With each, he thought back to Benny, to Dean, to the smell Castiel carried with him even now.

It was the smell of space, but there was a light still around them. A presence.

When he came around the tangled trunk of two trees grown together, he found his answer.

Benny, Dean, Castiel, Gabriel, all of them had been alive.

The body in the crater lay still, facing the dirt. Sam made himself as large as possible despite the urge to crumble. He made his way down the soft rim of the crater and choked back his sob while he turned the body over. A star should be able to escape upward, the dirt too foreign to be their end in. This was the best he could do for them now.

He knew without hesitating who the star was. Mother Mary. He never knew her, but had loved her through story. She was the one that would cover up the baby star’s mistakes. Hung herself in the sky near the nursery. Took the brunt of the yelling anytime one of them shone too bright or shifted.

They always said she'd fall for throwing herself in front of Chuck’s flames. It seemed they were right on that too. Some stars were not built for human bodies, too fragile and too full of fire.

He closed her eyes and stood up, wiping the tears from his face while he thought through his options. Whatever it was, he had to do it alone. There would be nothing worse than killing the idea of life Gabriel was beginning to see in this world.

“Uh Sam? Can I come out now or am I stuck in that corner all day like a damn toddler?” Gabriel’s voice called, moving through the trees. Sam could hear him at his back, footsteps halting.

“Don't-” Sam called.

Sam turned and in one moment, something beautiful died. Sam could hear the echo of the shatter from the middle of the crater, silent as it may have been.

Gabriel did not say anything. His footsteps hardly made a sound. Some grief weighed heavy, his seemed to send him to another world. One where gravity did not exist.

“Gabe,” Sam called through the sharpness of his own grief. He did not turn. Sam watched his silhouette disappear and, for one moment, wondered if he’d ever see it again. All of the planets in his solar system were rearranging, Jupiter sailing sunward. Sam felt it begin to burn. He imagined Gabriel’s were too, all of his planets aflame.

He could do nothing but wait and see if Gabriel would find his way back, however that may be. Sinking into the dirt, Sam cradled Mother Mary’s head in his lap. He had not known her, but he knew she loved them all. Fought for them all. She deserved a soft touch in a world so sharp to her. She deserved much more than dirt. More than Sam’s filthy hands. But it was all he had, and if she were anything like the stories? She would be grateful for even this. The ones so willing to burn were the ones most likely not to let someone else douse the flames. They would not put someone out like that. Refused to inconvenience even the world.

He wept for her. He wept for Gabriel. Not once did he think of weeping for himself.

He did not hear the footsteps. Did not hear Gabriel pause in a clearing of yellow flowers. It wasn't until the shovel from Sam's trunk struck dirt that he heard any sound at all.

Through the smell, he had noticed something strange too. There was a sound, a soft song threaded through the air. As Gabriel swung the shovel into the dirt and Sam forced himself back to the trunk to patch up her wounds as best he could, the stars began to sing their grieving song.

Sam stitched the places where her skin had split, wrapped her in the softest blanket of the bunch. He pulled off his boots and slid them onto her feet. No one should have to travel their funeral barefooted.

Gabriel came up behind him, sweat and dirt stained. He tilted his head, staring at her feet. She was ready for battle in the afterlife, though Sam hoped she would only need the boots for a hike on a mountain more beautiful than this Earth.

Still, it felt right to take the shovel from Gabriel’s hands after seeing his hands shake, blisters long since spilling blood, and hobble off-kilter to her grave. It made sense. Their world had shattered. At least now there was some proof if it. Every other step unbalanced and uneven, and rightfully so.

They finished her grave after the night had dipped to its fullest. The funeral symphony above growing louder with each swing. Neither of them said anything as they picked up her body to the dirt hole. Gabriel claimed the side with the boots. Sam let him.

“Maybe we should have buried her in her crater,” Sam said, realizing now that she may have wanted to be close to the smell of space, the ash of what she used to be.

Gabriel shook his head as they laid her in the field of yellow. “That is destruction. This,” he knelt in the flowers, “is where the life grows.”

Sam could see it down the line, flowers sprouting from the empty space. She would have loved it. The sky thought so too, the stars all singing their hearts out.

Sam looked up and the world was alight. They had lost, they had loved. Was that their mistake? Was it love that forced them all to hurt like this?

Sam thought of Dean and Cas and hoped that wasn't the case. They were happy in their love. It was not a doomed thing, but one of flowers growing from a grave. One of stars still shining even after they fall.

Gabriel and Sam covered her up handful by handful of dirt. It was morning by the end. Sam had no words to give her.

Gabriel laid back in the field, parallel to Mother Mary’s body now covered in her grave. Gabe  patted his side. Sam shrugged, laying too beside Gabriel.

“In the night, she was dead. With the sun, she becomes new life.”

Gabriel said it so surely, Sam believed every word. Gabriel turned to Sam and heaved a sob into the dirt. Sam laid there while he cried, close enough to touch. But, Gabriel didn't reach for him. Not even the brush of a finger. They were alone in their grief.

It was late morning when Sam stood up and began to walk to the car again, shovel in hand. He sat in the driver's seat, car running for half an hour before Gabriel emerged from the trees. He was pale everywhere, nothing left of his gold. Sam would not bet on it ever coming back, though he'd give anything to see just a glimmer again.

Two hours into the drive, Gabriel turned to Sam, sunken in. He had become a ghost in the night. They had spent so much time with Mary, with the other stars they each were thinking of, he became the echo of one himself.

“I am drowning,” he said. “And you are a fish, breathing in the water slowly killing me. I don't understand what good this is.”

Sam wasn't following. He hadn't ever felt anything but as if he was filling with water he didn't know how to breathe either. “What good what is?”

“Love,” Gabriel said. “That's the cost isn't it? Walking through an aquarium and pretending to be okay all the while I drown and drown and tap on the glass, asking fish how they learned how to adapt. Are they the fools for learning how to cope or me for not knowing what would happen to try to breathe water just once?”

He went quiet. Sam tried to make sense of the metaphor he spoke in.

“Just once I wanted to breathe water in a place it wasn't allowed. Now I can't seem to get it out of me.”

“But,” Sam said, soft. “You want to?”

“I have tried to learn to swim. I can't even do that,” Gabriel said.

Sam was going to say _please_. Going to say _love doesn't have to feel like choking_. He was going to say anything he'd have to to get Gabriel to fight for the love that seemed so doomed. _Remember the sky, the days you pushed the clouds_ , he’d ask. _Remember promising we’d never let them take us. Why does that have to stop now we have lungs? Where stars would drown, humans have learned to swim._

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t say anything. Gabriel sniffled in the passenger seat and they neared town before either of them had spoken again.

“Why?” Sam asked. Why does it hurt you so bad to love me?

“You stopped looking for me,” Gabriel whispered. “You stopped finding me beautiful. How could I think you’d want me now if you hadn’t when I was a star?”

Sam took his eyes off the road. “You were so dim, Gabriel. It hurt to know I did that to you. Besides, I was a human. I was nothing to you.”

“You said goodbye. I couldn’t keep shining after that,” Gabriel said.

“I didn’t think you were listening,” Sam said.

A car came careening down the road, slamming straight into the hood of the Impala, sending glass shattering before Sam had even turned back to the road. He’d never once seen a car on this road. He hadn’t even seen it coming, looking, always looking at Gabriel.


	12. Chapter 12

The impact sent him slamming into the steering wheel, seat belt catching tight. His hand hit something solid, knees bouncing into hard plastic. When they stopped moving, Sam could hardly breathe.

Gabriel groaned at his side, and Sam could feel his skin burning as it dug into glass covering their clothes. He tried to move his legs and was relieved to find them free to move around the limited space he had beneath the wheel.

He turned to Gabriel, heart sinking. He had a gash across his forehead spilling blood. His hand lay crumpled in his lap. He reached out, brushing Gabriel’s shoulder, his own hand screaming with pain. Two of his fingers were broken, he could tell that much by the angle they hung. Didn’t matter, he needed to see if Gabriel awake. If he was even alive.

“Gabe?” Sam asked, shaking his shoulder despite the pain he knew it would give the both of them. Gabriel blinked up at Sam, turning his head slowly.

“Gabriel?” Sam asked, voice shaking. “You’re going to be okay. Can you hear me?”

Gabriel’s head moved up and down in slow motion. Sam breathed half of a sigh, glad for his response at all. He reached into the back with his aching hand, feeling his way around the floor for anything that might help. There was an old blanket within reach so he snagged it and shoved it into Gabriel's hands. “Press it to your forehead.”

He reached around again, searching for the burner phone he’d grabbed. They could see their town in the distance, the shed a silhouette in the trees. Cas and Dean could come get them. They’d make it if he could just call.

The search on the floor came up empty. Sam turned back to the shattered windshield, remembering what had caused this mess. He looked around, unable to find who it was that hit them. They had driven away, had disappeared. How fitting to have left them broken and shattered and bleeding. It was the way of the stars, why shouldn’t it be the way of the Earth as well?

He shoved the door open, car dinging behind him, as he looked around. It was a wasteland, tire tracks left behind. He dragged his good hand over his face, tugging on glass embedded into his skin. Sam moved back towards the car, thinking he might be able to start the thing again and sputter their way home.

He was reaching for the door handle when the blow from behind came. Sam turned around swinging, connecting his fist to skin while his vision swam. When he turned, was a man that looked a lot like the silhouette of the one he’d left on that dingy bathroom floor with the bathtubs full of blood grinning at him, double and blurred.

A hand slammed his head into the side of the car and the pain bloomed faster than life itself, sharp and thudding. The man hooked Sam’s arm behind his back, still pressed against the car, and he couldn’t move without his shoulder screaming. It was the shoulder he’d shattered when he fell. It ached daily, the strain of it behind his back sending panic racing. One move too many and he’d shatter it beyond repair.

“Oh have I longed for this moment,” the man hissed in Sam’s ear, far too close. “Hear you’ve got a town of Starlight up ahead. Why don’t we take a little trip? Say hello to that brother of yours who so kindly left me a little blood a few weeks ago.”

But in town there was Dean and Cas, both of them unaware. He couldn’t let that happen. Not to them who had found love. Sam fought against the man despite the tugging on his shoulder, and he reared back, hand tangled in Sam’s hair, smashing his nose against the roof-edge of the car. Sam’s eyes watered and didn’t stop, blood gushing into his mouth, down his chin. When he spit it, it spattered against the window.

Through the window, Sam could see Gabriel begin to shift, reaching into the back seat. Sam prayed the man didn’t know he was in there, unprotected. Sam tried to tell him to stop, not to draw attention to himself. Why was he moving so much anyhow?

“Okay,” Sam said. “Okay. We go into town.”

“Now, now, what’s the hurry? Didn’t you have a friend with you?” the man said, peering through the window. Sam hissed, and inside he saw Gabriel contorted and bleeding, half of his body over the console. It was genius, Gabriel was a genius.

“He died in the crash,” Sam said, heart aching at just saying it and seeing Gabriel so still despite what he knew. He knew, too, how close he would be to death if the man caught wind of his blood spilling onto the floor mats. “Bled out already. He’s no use to you.”

“Could sell his skin, bet someone out there would want the skin of a star.”

Sam’s mind raced as the man moved towards the open door still dinging. “The others will smell the death. They’ll know you’re coming. It doesn’t take long.”

The man at his back scoffed, leaning close to his ear. So close when he spoke, spit spattered Sam’s cheek. “You think I’m stupid?”

“Yes, but I’m telling the truth anyhow,” Sam said, earning another blow. Through blurry vision, he titled his head up and prayed to any star he could think of to glow, please, for just one second. “See,” Sam said, spitting blood. “Even the ones up there are already catching wind.”

The man looked up and suddenly the stars were blinking awake. Sam whispered a thank you and let his head rest on the car for a moment, trying to find something stable. Everything was hurting, blood coating his lips while Gabriel looked like he’d found his grave inside the car. If there was a light in this darkness, he could not see a blink of it despite the stars coming awake.

“They’ll see us coming. Be gone by the time we get there,” Sam said. Pleading, he was pleading. He knew getting into the car would be disastrous, but Gabriel had to be given a chance at survival. His throat would be slit the moment the man saw how much blood he was losing to the dirt and leather seats.

“Just think, I’ll get to drain your blood in your own bathtub, to the chinny chin chin, ain’t that right little star?”

Sam spit blood at his feet and the man yanked at his hair.

“Now, now, little star. If I were a worse man, I'd make you lick my shoes clean. Say thank you Alistair, or I will.”

Sam huffed, refusing despite the yank on his shoulder.

Alistair tisked through his teeth. “You did this to yourself.”

He jerked Sam’s arm up his back and Sam could feel the bones shatter like starlight, burning like birth and more painful still. Before it was formation, this wholey destruction.

Alistair shoved him towards the treeline and Sam breathed a sigh of relief at having Gabriel alive inside the car. It could be Sam’s time to go only if Gabriel stayed. The world needed the life, the light, he brought. Everyone did.

Through the trees, Alistair’s car sat hidden by trunks and wood. The front was dinged, but Sam knew it would start. His stomach dropped, he'd been hoping for more damage. He was hoping he'd be the only one taken out in this mayhem.

He was pushed into the passenger seat, his right arm hanging limp.The pain from his nose, from his shoulder and his head, was nauseating. Vision swimming. What could he do but sit in the passenger seat and hope the others had fled by the time they arrived. Gabriel couldn’t risk glowing them a warning, but one glance at the sky told Sam some of the others had stuck around to see what the problem was. They were blinking out an SOS. They would save both of them in the town as long as they looked up.

“Look up,” Sam whispered, a form of prayer. “Dean, Cas, look up.”

“What’d you say?” Alistair asked from the driver’s seat. He had a knife in his right hand, twirling it around his fingers with finesse.

“Nice knife,” Sam said, wincing as his arm shifted at his side and sent the pain radiating down his spine. Whatever damage had been done, he wasn’t sure he’d ever recover. It felt too disconnected already, too alien from his body. His arm had become dead weight, but that didn’t matter now. He’d be dead in a few minutes. Nothing would matter but that Gabriel and Dean and Cas were safe.

They were heading past the sign into town when Sam caught a glimpse of Dean and Cas in one of the old cars Dean had been working on, taillights fading as they drove in the opposite direction out of town. Sam turned to Alistair, reaching for the knife. It wasn’t that he was hoping to get it, but instead he needed the man’s attention to be somewhere besides the road where Dean and Cas made their escape.

Alistair hardly swerved, hands agile on the knife, keeping it in his grasp. His eyes were no different than they’d been the entire time. It sent chills down Sam’s spine. He’d been expecting anger, outrage at his attempt at freedom. He got only what he’d gotten, the eyes of a man that loved to murder his kind. He loved every minute of this.

There was no rage in his knife, no anger driving him to relief. He would kill again and again and never be satisfied without a knife sinking into skin.

But, what could Sam do? He had saved his family, he had no power beyond what he’d used already. Alistair would slit his throat, that much he knew. But, he prayed Dean, Cas, and Gabriel would escape and know to check their backs. He knew they existed. He’d go after them next.

Sam frowned, a body lying on the side of the road into town. What had happened while they’d been gone? It struck him that he’d never find out.

Alistair parked in the center of town, and paused staring out the windshield. Sam lunged, hoping for one last attempt at an upper hand.

He received a knife in his thigh, spilling blood into his lap, and a snickering Alistair as he yanked it back out from Sam’s flesh. “Cute,” he said. “Now get out.”

Alistair threw open the door, dragging his fingers across the hood as he rounded to Sam’s side. Sam decided to refuse. If Alistair wanted him, he’d have to drag him to the bathtub, dead weight.

Alistair yanked Sam’s door open, straight faced, and reached into the car. Sam kept his face forward, resiting the only way he could. Alistair clamped a hand onto the back of Sam’s aching head, tangling his fingers in Sam’s hair, and he dragged him from the seat of the car. Sam fell onto the dirt, keeping himself as heavy as possible as Alistair started towards the nearest house.

His arm dragged, torn up by the rocks as Sam was pulled through the road. His bleeding leg matted with dirt and Sam thought that might be useful. A way to staunch the blood flow. Though, if Alistair kept his grip, Sam would have no need for it in a few minutes.

It was impossible to keep his face above the dirt with one arm out of commission as Alistair dragged him up the concrete stairs. Sam realized where they’d ended up, the door with vines covering the outside looming into view as Sam slammed his chin on stair after stair.

Stars bloomed and the fading part of Sam thought that was right. To die with stars swimming on the Earth. He could pretend the world had melted, everything coming together. No longer would the stars be out of reach, no longer would the dirt be far away. There’d be stars floating down each and every river. Sam thought they all deserved to feel like Saturn for a day, floating freely through space.

It was slow going since Sam refused to cooperate. In his concussed state, it felt like hours until they made it up those stairs. In reality, it had been five minutes as Alistair slashed the vines straight across despite only one being in the way of the doorknob, and kicking it open. Sam stared at the bootprint he left behind, thinking about Gabriel having to see that every day.

He whispered he was sorry as Alistair dragged him across the threshold of Gabriel’s house, his first entrance leaving a trail of blood behind. Gabriel would have to clean it up. The bathtub too with Sam’s drained body inside. It broke his heart to know. Sam sent a mumbled prayer to Dean, pleading with him to be the one to clean his body up.

Alistair left Sam on the kitchen tile while he searched the apartment for the bathroom. It was tucked inside the bedroom, so he was gone long enough for Sam to catch a sight of the stars still flickering through the open window.

“Goodbye,” Sam said. Alistair came back into view. It had been a lifetime since the crash, since Gabriel talked about how he loved Sam but couldn’t. The man hacked a cough, clutching his knees, and Sam watching him, unmoving, right himself and come closer. He snagged Sam by the hair again and pulled him into the bathroom, his arm useless and caught beneath his body all the way. He thought he heard a pop in his wrist, or possibly his elbow, but the pain was all consuming and he couldn’t tell the parts of his arm apart anymore.

In the bathroom, Alistair had thrown open the window. He left Sam in the middle of the tile while he went back to his car for the things he’d brought. Things to hold the blood he drained. The pieces of Sam he decided to keep.

“Strip and get in the tub before I get back or I’ll cut everything off. I won’t be gentle about it,” Alistair said, far too close to Sam’s face, hissing as he spoke.

Even if he wanted to, there was no way Sam would be able to get his clothes off. Not with his arm a mess of bone. Not with his leg seeping blood. Sam closed his eyes and let his thoughts drift while the sound of Alistair coughing echoed up from the street.

Then the door was opening and Sam was still swimming in the dream he’d fallen into. A hallucination. It was his star life again, suspended in the sky. But, it was only him and Gabriel, the rest of the sky blank. Gabriel moved close, initiating their dance. Sam joined, closer than they’d been before. This close, Sam could feel the heat of Gabriel’s heart. Could feel the flicker of his soul.

When Alistair straddled Sam’s waist, knife glinting, Sam could still feel the warmth. Part of him, the one that felt outside his body, knew it was the blood seeping from the wounds Alistair left as he dragged the knife through Sam’s t-shirt. They were surface wounds, but they covered his body in blood. His jeans went next, long slashes down the center of his thighs all the way to his ankles. His boots Alistair yanked off, twisting Sam’s ankle until he felt it pop. All the while Sam was swimming in starlight again.

When he was naked and stained red, Alistair dragged him into the bathtub. He set him in the porcelain ring, tilting Sam’s head up. There was no more energy in Sam, not after the fight he’d put up to get the others safe. Not after seeing the sky behind his eyes again. When he died, he’d go there. He was sure of it.

Alistair stopped to cough, spitting blood onto the floor. Sam didn’t have the energy to ask why he was coughing blood, or why it was getting worse in the minutes they’d been together. He had no energy to think of anything but an afterlife of an empty sky, just him and Gabriel dancing. In his dream, they became humans, skin to skin, then stars again. They could touch each other’s hearts, their souls, and no one could stop them from reaching out. Closing the distance that had forever been between them.

In the tub, Sam let his good arm reach out just as Alistair tipped his chin back between harsh fingers. He brought the knife to Sam’s throat, waited just a moment. Then he dragged the blade against Sam’s throat.

He was conscious just enough to see Alistair fall to the floor, head slamming against the tile in a spatter of blood, throat hissing as it failed to take in oxygen. Just long enough to see someone come through the bathroom door. To feel a hand lower Sam’s still-outstretched arm to his side. Long enough to imagine Gabriel’s voice, words mushy. Hands against Sam’s throat. To imagine Gabriel’s lips against his own for just one moment. That’s all there was.

* * *

Cas put ten stitches to Sam’s forehead. Another couple dozen to his throat. Each leg got enough for Cas’s hands to start cramping. Gabriel with shaking hands had to take over just to give him a break. Sam’s arms too got long lines of stitches all the way down.

His nose was broken. His shoulder was broken in three places, his elbow and wrist too. Some of his fingers were shattered and Castiel did his best to set them with what they had.

Cas thought his jaw might be fractured by the way it swelled at the joints, but it went down before Sam had even woken up so he’d have to wait and see.

The stab wound in his thigh had missed vital nerves. The slit across his throat didn’t hit the jugular. Tiny miracles in a body that desperately needed them to survive.

Dean drove an entire state over to pick up blood from a blood bank, taking a vial of Sam’s for them to test. They only let him take it when he slipped the receptionist a few bills under the table and pretended to look as she tucked them into her bra.

Sam grew feverish after two days, shivering as he slept. One night, the shaking grew so violent, Gabriel slept on top of him so he wouldn’t jar his stitches. He wept the entire time, Gabriel. Dean cried silently, sitting against a wall. Cas held his hand.

Going to a hospital was discussed. But, seeing Sam as he was, they didn’t figure further exposure was an idea they wanted to entertain. Who knows who would be watching, tracing them back here?

Gabriel refused to let anyone else take watch. He talked in circles. Sometimes, for hours, he’d repeat the same thing over and over again.

Here is what an orchid means. Love. Beauty. At a funeral, they mean I will always love you.

_Sam, I will always love you. Sam, I will always love you._

_Sam, I will always love you._

There was water coming from the sky, thunder booming. The stars were in trouble for what they had done. The rules they had broken to save their own on Earth.

Sam awoke and he was being born again. Pain, fire, the world shaking around him. He felt like he was falling through emptiness. He shut his eyes tight. This was not what he had wanted, to burst into flame again. Hadn’t he done that enough? Couldn’t he have an afterlife softer than he’d known? Wasn’t that the deal?

Through the flames, Sam caught glimpses of the story he would hear later. Gabriel’s lips moving, a nasty stitched gash on his forehead. Castiel bent over Sam’s arm, poking at it with something sharp. Dean sitting at his side, head in his hands. All of it was fuzzy. All of it melting in the flame.

* * *

There was a scraping sound. Sam blinked awake. For once, the world seemed steadier, though the flames still burned his skin. He glanced around without moving his head, finding the bottom of a pair of boots just out of view.

Sam coughed, regretting the movement as it jarred his throat, and the boots shifted, Gabriel emerged. He began to cry as he met Sam’s eyes. Cry and cry, hands wiping at his face and leaving red streaks behind.

“Blood,” Sam rasped.

Gabriel looked down, arms stained to the elbow, knees of his jeans seeping red. He shook his head. “It’s not mine.”

Sam didn’t have the energy to ask whose it was. He’d find out later it took Gabriel four days to scrub the blood from the ring in the bath. Four more to tear out the stained carpet and install new patches they’d taken from another home. He hadn’t painted the bootprint from the door. He hadn’t left the apartment at all. Not yet, not yet. Not while Sam was sleeping.

Gabriel brought a cup of water to his lips and Sam winced as he swallowed. It hurt. Everything hurt. He couldn’t help the groan, even that drawing a sharp pain from his throat.

Gabriel sat at his side and Sam could see tears falling again. “I’m sorry, Sam. I know this hurts. But, please, you have to stick it out. You did so well. So, so well. But, you’ve got to keep going.”

Sam knew it would hurt. But, this suffering was unbearable. Sam looked at Gabriel and shook his head, just once to each side. Wouldn’t death be better than this? Now, it would be easier. He could go holding Gabriel’s hand.

Gabriel clutched his hand, water spilling down their arms, and he began to sob. Sam closed his eyes and whispered, “I’ll try.”

That was all he could do.

* * *

Through the next week, he wanted to die more than he wanted to live. There was such pain in his life, it had morphed into something strange and stretching. He wasn’t alive. He was on fire, and this time it was not the means to a life of starlight, but to a life of more and more pain.

Sam was stuck on Gabriel’s couch. It was the furthest they could risk carrying him, losing so much blood. Dean had come to visit one night while Gabriel slept curled on the recliner within reach of Sam’s good arm.

Dean sat, his back against the couch, and he stared at a TV they’d recovered, while Sam stared at the ceiling. He’d comment through the movie, not realizing Sam hadn’t seen a second of it. He couldn’t muster the courage to turn his head. He was trapped by pain and inside of it.

“Hey,” Dean said, turning the volume to zero. “Promise me something, will you?”

Sam made a soft noise, thinking it would keep the pain small too. It worked, but only a little.

“Don’t give up,” Dean said. “You’re the reason I’m alive. My family. I can’t do this without you. None of us can. Please, Sammy, I’m begging here.”

Sam’s heart swelled. He opened his mouth. “It hurts,” he whispered. “More than birth.”

Dean froze, turning his head to find Sam leaking tears down the side of his unmoving face. There was not a part of Sam that he could see without stitches or blood or raw skin where it had been scraped off. There was not a part of Sam that he could move without flames erupting. Dean swallowed hard and Sam turned his head ever so slightly. He found Dean crying. He found Dean’s heart, broken on the ground.

“I’m sorry for asking this of you,” Dean said. “I know it’s selfish. But, please.” His voice broke on the last word and Sam decided he’d give it another day. Two. For Dean, he’d keep trying to find some relief in the torture this world had become. For Cas who asked so little of him. For Gabriel who asked the world.

There was a day, less than a week later, that Sam found he could breathe again. He could see something other than mush in the ceiling. Gabriel’s voice drifted from the recliner, reading from a book on stars. Sam turned, wincing, and met his eye.

“Sam?”

“Tell me,” Sam whispered. “Tell me what happened to us.”

“You mean with Alistair?”

Sam shook his head and Gabriel reached out, trying to stop him from bringing the pain back, from popping a stitch.

“I mean with us. You and me.”

“I loved you. I lost you,” Gabriel said, shutting his book. “It is hard for me to think I won’t lose you again.”

“I’m still here.”

“Sam, I had to tell you it was okay to leave. To die. Do you have any idea how much that hurt?” Gabriel whispered.

“I know,” Sam said. He had been telling Gabriel it was okay to leave since he landed here on Earth. “I said goodbye once too.”

“I heard,” Gabriel said, voice cracking.

Sam sighed, catching his breath. “Can you promise me something?”

“Anything.”

“Don’t ever say goodbye to me again,” Sam said. “I don’t care if you love me, but don’t say goodbye. Don’t leave.”

“Only if you don’t either,” Gabriel said. Sam nodded, Gabriel winced at the movement. He cradled Sam’s head with gentle fingers. The promise was made.

It was a few minutes, Sam falling back asleep, as Gabriel loomed over him on the couch inspecting his wounds. As Gabriel checked his wounds, he leaned in close, whispering where Alistair had spit. “I do love you, you know.”

Gabriel kissed him soft and Sam couldn’t do anything for the pain was swallowing him again. He let his lips quirk into a smile and fell back asleep.

* * *

There had been a chemical leak at the oil plant that had come into town, they told Sam. Too high levels of chlorine gas from a mixture gone wrong. A toxic cloud had loomed, people evacuating as their lungs began to constrict. That’s why Alistair dropped.

They’d figured it out when the delivery man Gabriel had called about groceries came to deliver and died in the middle of carrying the crates to the back door of the store. Cas found him, and then the stars were blinking SOS and he could see the aftermath of the crash in the distance. He grabbed Dean when he saw the car coming their way. One they didn’t recognize. They decided to loop around the town, leave in the opposite direction. The payphone had been ringing, Gabriel had managed to dial amidst his daze.

They grabbed Gabriel first, got the stuttered story from him as he passed in and out of consciousness. His was mostly a flesh wound, a concussion. A few stitches and he was back on his feet.

Dean told Sam that Gabriel had knelt in that bathtub with his hands against the slit in his throat until both of their ankles were soaked. Until Cas could find enough equipment for stitching all of Sam’s wounds. Until they could find a way to lift Sam without Gabriel removing pressure.

Cas stitched him up in the bathtub. His throat and head anyhow. They carried him to the couch where Cas spent hours stitching up the rest. Gabriel did the entire right side of his body, Cas’s hands shaking as he began to hyperventilate at the mess Sam was in.

Gabriel had steady hands. He had stitched that star onto his t-shirt. How hard could stitching skin be? Dean said he had been dripping tears onto Sam’s body the whole way. Cas would reach out, but Gabriel would shake his head. His hands were fine. And they were. Strong and steady, as his stomach threatened to throw up everything he’d ever consumed and his heart too.

As Castiel took the stitches out, Gabriel held Sam’s hand through the whole thing. It was an odd feeling, the tugging of his skin. He kept thinking about how he was sure he was dead. This body was as foreign as it was the first time he fell.

“You want to go swimming today?” Gabriel asked. “Cas gave the okay.”

Cas’s glare said otherwise. Sam shook his head. “Tomorrow.”

It was another hour before Cas was done with the stitches anyhow. Sam still had to use Gabriel as a crutch just to get to the bathroom. He thought it would be better without the stitches. He’d needed help going to the bathroom, each of them worried about his stitches tearing open and restarting the healing process.

He didn’t tell them that was what each day felt like. Tearing everything open and hoping to heal again. He didn’t tell them and eventually it stopped feeling so much like being raw and aching all day and instead like he was actually healing.

When he finally agreed to go to the river, Gabriel let him walk on his own only after Cas and Dean has stopped watching. Supposedly. Sam wouldn’t put it past Doctor Cas to be lurking in the trees to make sure nothing happened.

Gabriel stripped Sam of everything but his boxers, helped him wrap his cast in plastic so it wouldn’t get wet and soggy. He helped Sam lower himself into the water, cold now the winter had come.

Sam had asked Gabriel to bring soap, and after a few minutes of floating, he beckoned him into the water. “Help me wash my hair,” Sam said.

Gabriel raised his eyebrows from the bank. Sam rolled his. “I don’t know if you know this, but I kind of can’t bend my fucking arm. Wash my goddamn hair.”

Gabriel grinned.  He waded into the water, cradled Sam’s head in his hands. As he massaged soap onto Sam’s scalp, he said, “It was you, you know.”

“What was?” Sam asked, eyes closed.

“The star on my t-shirt that day in the car. You asked if it was me,” Gabriel said. “It wasn’t. It was you.”

Sam used his good arm to pull Gabriel down, finding his lips the best he could being upside down, and floating and one-armed and so very tired. There was soap on Gabriel’s chin when he pulled away and Sam grinned as Gabriel washed the rest of it out of his hair.

* * *

A few days after, Sam saw a star fall from the window in Gabriel’s room. They wouldn’t let him go, instead Dean and Cas leaving the two of them behind. Sam wandered town, finding his feet steadier with each passing day. One night as he made his way from the river back to Gabriel’s, he saw a glow from the studio.

At the door, he paused, seeing Gabriel spin and spin, leaping up with a grin on his face. This was a celebration dance, full of gold and glow.

“What are you celebrating for?”

“You,” Gabriel said. He held out his arms and Sam moved to them. Gabriel was gentle, the dance turning more into small steps from side to side, but still they danced, each of them aglow.

Dean and Cas came back, headlights cutting through the glass.

The star had been fine. She hadn’t wanted to come back here. They had cleaned up her minor cuts and given her food and clothes for the night. They had showed her where they were on a map they gave her if she ever changed her mind.

“What was her name?” Sam asked.

“Jo,” Dean said. “Her name was Jo.”

* * *

After a month, Gabriel sank down onto the couch beside Sam. “You can go, if you want.”

“Go?” Sam asked.

“Move out. You aren’t trapped here anymore.”

In all honestly, Sam had forgotten about moving back. This place was just big enough for the two of them, had hot water. Gabriel loved to cook, let Sam pick the movie channels as long as he did the laundry every week. They had fallen into a routine.

Sam looked around, finding a water stain on the coffee table from Sam’s favorite place to watch TV, Gabriel tucked under his arm.

Sam turned to find Gabriel chewing on his lip. He was right before. He wouldn’t ever stop thinking Sam was going to leave. Sam shook his head. “I haven’t felt trapped here in a long time.”

He grabbed Gabriel’s face between stern hands and kissed him until the stars came out. “I won't stop until you believe that I won't leave,” Sam whispered. He kissed down Gabriel’s neck, grinning as Gabriel groaned. With each opened button of Gabriel’s shirt, Sam whispered he wouldn’t leave as he pressed his lips to soft skin.

When he got to Gabriel’s jeans, he looked up. “Believe me now, or do I need to keep going?”

Gabriel grinned. “I think I might need a little more convincing.”

Sam popped the top button with a grin.

* * *

When the next star fell, Sam turned to Gabriel where he stood at the stove, steam rising. “Hey, you see that?”

Gabriel looked up, catching the tail end of the star’s fall. “You feeling okay?”

“I’m fine. We both know it.” Sam’s arm was still weak, but the cast was off and he could bend it almost as far as he used to be able to. His fingers too were mostly okay. Some things he wouldn’t get back. That was okay.

“Then we go,” Gabriel said.

On the car ride, Gabriel turned down the music. “Did you ever figure out why we fell?”

“I had a thought,” Sam said. “What do you think?”

“I think we fell because we loved each other. The sky isn’t made to keep love alive. There is no oxygen, too much emptiness. That is all anything in the sky ever becomes.”

Sam nodded, grabbing Gabriel’s hand on the console between them. “Down here it thrives. That’s why we saw so many people marching to war. Love thrives here. It consumes us all.”

He squeezed Sam’s hand as they soared under the sky on their way to fetch a star. To show them what the world could be, now they had lost space. They’d spend their lives growing the town of Starlight, a beacon to the fallen. It was the least they could do, having found something thriving only after they fell. Having found such life in each other.

“I never thought I’d say this,” Gabriel said, still holding Sam’s hand, “but I’m glad to be human if that’s what it takes for us, this, to survive.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think below or drop by my inbox on Tumblr at [ KibbersWrites](https://kibberswrites.tumblr.com/)!


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